More research into Poland's experience of WWII.
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The Wojciechowskis - father Jozef, mother Helena, Amelia, Stanislaw, Boleslaw, twins Maria and Krystyna and little Jan, the youngest by six years - were a farming family from the east of Poland, that giant billiard table between Europe and Russia, across which invading armies have marched throughout history, leaving devastated populations behind them.
When Jan was about six years old, in September 1939, Hitler's tanks rolled in.
Less than three weeks later, Stalin's armies invaded from the east, equipped not only with weapons, but with a plan to rid the eastern provinces of the Polish farmers.
Within days of the Soviet arrival in the Wojciechowski's district, John's father - a World War I hero who had been rewarded with farmland in the east - was taken away and, the family learned years later, shot.
Over the next four months the Wojciechowskis endured constant searches of their house by Soviet soldiers who took anything they wanted.
Then, on the night of February 10, 1940, they and nearly a quarter of a million people in eastern Poland were given 15 minutes to collect their belongings, and put on convoys of cattle-truck trains that carried them to Stalin's slave labour camps in Siberia and the Arctic Circle.
"The world is almost completely unaware of the tragedy of the Polish borderlands in 1940," Parker writes in A Strange Outcome. "There is almost no acknowledgment of one of the greatest enforced migrations in history."
So appalling were the conditions on that six-week train journey that one in 10 people died before they arrived at their destination.
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In 1938 the Soviets and the Nazis had signed a non-aggression pact. Joseph Stalin, supreme leader of the Soviet Union, saw Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland as a perfect opportunity to grab a part of the country as well.
Two weeks after the Germans invaded, on September 17, Soviet troops occupied the eastern half of Poland, annexing the area to the Ukraine and Belorussia.
During the winter of 1939-40 the Soviets began evicting Poles from their homes and deporting them to Russia. Over a million were deported during this period. Their homes were given to Russians.
For the most part these evictions were done at gunpoint by Soviet troops and members of the feared Soviet state police, the NKVD.
[...]
Anna and her family were put into a sleigh and, under armed guard, taken to a nearby railway siding.
"We were locked into a cattle car with a lot of other families. It was soon overcrowded and there was not enough room for anyone to lie down. It was freezing cold and we didn't have warm clothes."
Most of the families had been driven out of their houses without being allowed to pack any clothes. They travelled in what they had been wearing.
The train stood at the siding for about seven hours before it began the long journey to Siberia.
They were given little food on the journey and the only ablution facilities was a hole in the floor of the railway wagon. The cold at times plunged to -60. Many passengers did not survive the trip. Anna's 8-year-old sister died from the cold.
Mary Maczakowska was 13 when her family was rounded up for deportation to Siberia in 1940. "The labour camp in Siberia was terrible," she says. "In winter the average was -50. It was so cold that if you cried your eyes would freeze." In summer, however, it was not uncommon for those in the Siberian labour camps to die of heat stroke. Both Ms Maczakowska's parents died during the winter of 1940.
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The first mass deportation was originally intended to be followed by a second and a third. The second was planned to take place a month later, in July of 1941. But the German advance was so quick as to render the Communist annihilation battalions unable to execute the second and third deportations, except in the island Saaremaa which the Germans reached later than the mainland. To judge from what the Communists managed to do in Saaremaa, the second and third waves would have been considerably more extensive than the first. According to the detailed lists of names prepared for the entire country as many would have been deported as were sent away when the Baltic farms were collectivised in the spring of 1949.
One of the deported was a young boy who wrote a diary from the day in spring when he and his parents were sent to Siberia until the day in 1944 when he ran out of paper. The boy and his mother were as usual separated from the father before the transport to the Gulag Archipelago. The boy describes everything that happens in his life, how one friend after the other dies from malnutrition, how an acquaintance steals a potato to keep from starving to death and is thrown in jail as punishment, how he and his mother survive by eating nettle soup, etc. Every third or forth notation ends with the question: "Daddy, where are you? Why don't you take me away from here? Please, God, send my love to my father ". But of course the father is already dead. Maybe a book like this one, an Estonian "Diary of Anne Frank" could make a few more people understand what our Baltic neighbours went through, if a Western publishing house wanted to publish it.
Among the deported was the Estonian president Konstantin Pats, who was sent away as early as in July 1940 and arrested in June 1941 and consequently kept prisoner in different locations until he died in a mental hospital in Burachevo in Russia in January 1956. In June 1977, three of the president's letters reached the West, written when he was in Soviet captivity - probably in 1953 since he mentioned his upcoming 80th birthday. The letters were signed by him and carried his thumb print.
The last president of inter-war Estonia wrote that he had been subjected to all kinds of humiliations and that his life had been threatened. He was not allowed to use his own name, and was simply called "No 12". He was not allowed to write to his family or receive any help from them. In one of the letters he addressed the world and asked for help to the Baltic peoples:"I turn to the United Nations and the entire enlightened world in a request for help to the peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, against whom the Russian occupants use such force as to make them succumb. I declare the annexation of the Baltic states, carried through in 1940, a brutal crime against international law and a false representation of the true wills of these annexed peoples. Save these peoples from complete annihilation and allow them to decide their own destinies. Establish a UN authority in the Baltic states to supervise a referendum in the aforementioned states where their citizens would be able to express their true wishes. May Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania be free and independent states!These letters caused no reaction in the UN or from politicians in neighbouring countries like Sweden. President Pats' remains were found in 1990 and re-buried in Tallinn.
K Pats (signature) (finger print)"
Altogether eight former heads of state and 38 ministers from Estonia were deported. The same fate befell three former heads of state and 15 ministers from Latvia, and the president, five prime ministers and 24 other Lithuanian ministers.
Among the deported and later executed were also a large number of officers, among them 79 generals and colonels from Estonia. In Latvia, all high ranking officers were ordered to go to Moscow for "supplementary education" the day before the mass deportation of 1941; most of them were arrested on arrival and later shot or incarcerated in camps. The Communists acted in the same way in neighbouring countries like Poland where most of the Polish officers that had been captured during Hitler's and Stalin's 1939-40 attack were executed. Around 4 500 were executed in Katyn and those are among the few whose destiny finally attracted attention in the West.
In Latvia 7 020 Latvians, according to the incomplete statistics of the Red Cross, were arrested and sentenced (before the large deportation of June 1941); out of these 980 persons were executed and buried in eight mass graves. The rest were sent to Siberian camps. Later came the first large deportation of June 1941:"The shock to the Latvian people was terrible. After June 14 people were afraid to stay at home, many spent the nights with acquaintances in distant places or ran off into the woods, desperation was the prevalent emotion. One macabre part was that the authorities pretended that nothing had happened, the newspapers contained nothing on the deportations, nobody had any information on those who had disappeared, there was nowhere to go for help or information. The world was silent."
Andres Kung/Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation seminar 13.Apr.99
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Katyn Forest
Remembering Katyn"The less said about that the better."
-Winston Churchill
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Britain and the Katyn Massacre
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The Katyn Controversy
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Katyn Forest Massacre
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Massacre at Katyn Forest
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Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest Massacre
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Katyn Family Stories-:-:-
Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942
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Many Polish Boys were named Dariusz: A chapter of forgotten History of Iran-
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Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria
Beria
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Beria/Katyn
