As many of you know, the nightmare began in the middle of the night on 10 February 1940 for many families, including mine and for others over the following months. In our search to find out our Polish families' lives both in Poland and in exile, one key element for the Polish soldiers, for their families and also displaced people We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. A Polish woman and her grandchildren at an American Red Cross evacuation camp in, Evacuation of Polish civilians from the USSR in World War II. [4] Maurice, Count de Benyovszky was deported and emigrated to Madagascar . These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Normally, at this point, the news of the families arrest would spread like wildfire around the village. Her son died young due to an accident; her daughter still lives in South Africa with her grandchildren.[16]. [6][7] The Soviets did not classify Polish military personnel as prisoners of war, but as rebels against the new Soviet government in today's Western Ukraine and West Belarus. In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported a total of more than 1,200,000 Poles in four waves of mass deportations from the Soviet-occupied Polish territories. In March 1943 all Poles remaining in the Soviet Union were forced to accept Soviet citizenship. People kept their own gardens, with vegetables. A short ride normally on a sleigh or horse and cart (where the cart was often a re-purposed dung cart) would then take the family to the railway siding. The newly proposed borders drawn for post war Poland between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta meant all these people had lost their home towns to the Soviets and had no homes to fight for anymore. [56] Pre-war Poland was portrayed as a capitalist state based on exploitation of the working people and ethnic minorities. Whilst many were deported to hard labour camps under prison guard in Siberia (Gulags) , others worked on collective farms in Siberia. The trains travelled in extreme cold temperatures, hands would get stuck to the side of trains and ripping skin off was a real hazard. [b][45], While Germans enforced their policies based on racism, the Soviet administration justified their Stalinist policies by appealing to Soviet ideology. WebThe decoration Sybir Deportee Cross was established on October 17 th, 2003 in order to recognise and commemorate the sufferings of Polish citizens deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan and Northern Russia from 1939 to 1956. There was a mast with a huge Polish flag, and the White Eagle on the gate."[12]. There were sports teams, a choir and activities groups. In London the Polish Government in Exile and the Soviet Union came to an agreement that the Soviets would release their Polish prisoners so that an army, commanded by General Wladyslaw Anders (also to be set free from prison), could be formed in Russia. A Polish Child's WWII Journey. Living in Africa was very difficult for the Poles who were unfamiliar with local customs and languages and were not used to tropical weather. Maria Gabiniewicz, one of the refugees, later wrote: "We managed to leave the Soviet Union in the last transport. Tens of thousands of ethnic Poles became victims of the Great Purge in 19371938 (see Polish operation of the NKVD ). Only one third of them survived. contains. is exactly. The majority of Polish Jews who survived World War II did so in the Soviet Union, some in the gulags of Siberia, experiencing forced labor, hunger, and illnesses. In August 1942, two schools were created, for younger (aged 8-15) and older scouts. 
[27] The prisons soon got severely overcrowded, with all detainees accused of anti-Soviet activities. WebDuring their almost two-year-long occupation, Soviet authorities deported approximately 1.25 million Poles to many parts of the Soviet Union. info@meds.or.ke For nearly two years following the invasion, the two occupiers continued to discuss bilateral plans for dealing with the Polish resistance during Gestapo-NKVD Conferences until Germany's Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, in June 1941.[8]. [4] Maurice, Count de Benyovszky was deported and emigrated to Madagascar . There is some controversy as to whether the Soviet Union's policies were harsher than those of Nazi Germany until that time. Wanda Nowoisiad-Ostrowska, quoted by historian Tadeusz Piotrowski (The Polish Deportees of World War II), remembered that Abercorn camp was divided into six sections of single-room houses, a washing area, a laundry, a church, and four school buildings with seven classes. 5.1 million or 38% of the population were Polish by ethnicity (wrote Elbieta Trela-Mazur),[11] with 37% Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians and 0.6% Germans. The deportation of Poles in 1939 from their homeland is one of histories great "barely told" travesties. 
The words "Siberia" and "Soviet Gulags" often get used interchangeably with the same meaning being adopted, that is, a hard labour camp. The documents of the era show that the problem of sexual violence against Polish women by Soviet servicemen was serious both during and after the advance of Soviet forces across Poland. It was established on October 17, 2003 in order to recognise and commemorate the sufferings of Polish citizens deported to Siberia , Kazakhstan and Northern Russia from 19391956. Initially aimed primarily at possible political opponents, by January 1940 the NKVD's campaign was also directed against potential allies, including Polish Communists and Socialists. Children were taken care of by the Polish Red Cross and residents of Bombay. [28] The wave of arrests and mock convictions contributed to the forced resettlement of large categories of people ("kulaks", Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors, "osadniks") to the Gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union. WebDeportations of Poles to Siberia noted in 1940 Congressional Record. Even hair would get frozen to the side of trains if blown against it. Stephen P. Morse, San Francisco. 
After Russia invaded Poland, Stalin deported 1.7 million Poles to slave labour camps in Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Arkhangelsk Oblast in the north, in cattle trucks. Polish deportees being forcefully boarded onto a "deportation train" to Siberia. WebA Polish-Soviet treaty was agreed allowing the release of all Poles held in labour camps and the formation of a new Polish army. "[65], To this day, the events of those and the following years constitute stumbling blocks in Polish-Russian foreign relations. 
The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. WebRussian and Soviet authorities exiled many Poles to Siberia, starting with the 18th-century opponents of the Russian Empire 's increasing influence in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth (most notably the members of the Bar Confederation of 1768-1772). [29] Altogether the Soviets sent roughly a million people from Poland to Siberia. [11] There were also 336,000 refugees from areas occupied by Germany, most of them Jews (198,000). [3][5], Approximately 100,000 Polish citizens were arrested during the two years of Soviet occupation. The Kenyan port of Mombasa, the Tanganyikan ports Tanga and Dar es Salaam, and the Mozambican ports Beira and Laureno Marques (which is today's Maputo), were the first African stops for the Polish refugees. Forty-five new faculty members were assigned to Lww, transferred from other institutions of Soviet Ukraine, mainly the Kharkiv and Kiev universities. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. [7] The categories first targeted by the NKVD included court judges, civil servants, staff of municipal governments, members of the police force, refugees from western Poland, tradesmen, forestry workers, settlers, and small farmers, as well as children from summer camps and Polish orphanages, family members of anyone arrested by the NKVD, and family members of anyone who had escaped to the West or had gone missing. There are many pictures on Pinterest of the abandoned Siberian railway (well worth a look). WebIn February 1940 the Soviet Union started to deport Poles to exile in Siberia. "In the 1939-1941 period alone, Soviet-inflicted suffering on all citizens in Poland exceeded that of Nazi-inflicted suffering on all citizens. The fourth and final wave occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000. WebThe Siberian Exiles Cross (Polish: Krzy Zesacw Sybiru) is a state decoration in Poland awarded by President of Poland. They were given a short amount of time to get some belongings together (many took barrels of salted meat, photo albums, foodstuffs and winter clothes). In 1989, the Soviet Union apologized for its crimes against Poland. [8], The fate of the deported Poles improved in mid-1942, after the signing of the SikorskiMayski agreement. The house itself would then be searched for weapons. They were going from Kigoma to Dar es Salaam and from there by ship to the United Kingdom, where their next of kinoften husbands and sons who had been fighting in the warwere getting courses and training for civilian jobs. Poles in Mexico were not allowed to leave their camps. 
Wave 2 - Apr 1940 Families of officers imprisoned in the Soviet Union and Poland, in hiding and abroad. 
Repeated urgent knocks would follow, with urgent shouts to hurry up and open the door. [18] In late 1942 and early 1943, Polish camps in Iran were located at Tehran, Isfahan, Mashhad, and Ahvaz. At first, they were transported to the town of Bandra, in the suburbs of Bombay, where Hanka Ordonwna took care of the kids. [6][7] Since 1939 German and Soviet officials coordinated their Poland-related policies and repressive actions. This was about one in ten of all adult males. Web+254-730-160000 +254-719-086000. 
A smaller-scale evacuation to Ashkhabad-Mashhad followed, including the large and final group of civilians. For more click here. After the Polish Army had left the Soviet Union, the attitude of the Soviets towards the remaining Poles worsened. Tens of thousands of ethnic Poles became victims of the Great Purge in 19371938 (see Polish operation of the NKVD ). Lack of food, water and extreme temperatures caused some to die in the overfilled carriages. As children of the children who survived, we too felt the fear of telling other children how our parents got to the UK, receiving incredulous or blank looks as if we were making it up. Polish and Jewish citizens may at first have preferred a Soviet regime to a German one,[40] but the Soviets soon proved they were also hostile and destructive towards the Polish citizens. Johanna Granville, Out of the original group of Polish prisoners of war sent in large number to the labour camps were some 25,000 ordinary soldiers separated from the rest of their colleagues and imprisoned in a work camp in, The actual number of deported in the period of 1939-1941 remains unknown and various estimates vary from 350,000 (, Approximately 250,000 Polish prisoners of war, German advance across the Soviet occupation zone, exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union, show trial of 16 Polish wartime resistance movement leaders, Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, Raids on communist prisons in Poland (19441946), Flight and expulsion of Poles from the USSR, Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Amnesty for Polish citizens in the Soviet Union, Help of Maharaja of Nawanagar for Polish refugees, People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, population exchange between Poland and Soviet Ukraine, 1.1 million Poles (including Polish Jews), Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939-1946), List of Soviet Union prison sites that detained Poles, List of Polish refugees cemeteries in Africa. There were four major deportations: Wave 1 - 10th Feb 1940 - 218,000 Deported. Web1940, February to April: (The Red Army annexed territories in the eastern parts of Poland) About 250,000 Poles and thousands of Ukrainians and Byelorussians were deported in three major waves to Siberia and to Central and Far Eastern Asia in order to remove the most active populations from the annexed territories. I n 1940, after Russia invaded Poland, Stalin deported 1.7 million Poles to slave labour camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. [41][42] They began confiscating, nationalising and redistributing all private and state-owned Polish property. During the second evacuation, 69,247 persons left the Soviet Union, including 25,501 civilians (9,633 children). [11] Polish literature and language studies were dissolved by Soviet authorities. The food was delivered: rice, flour, meat, salt, sugar, tea, and some coffee. 
[5], The evacuation of the Polish people from the USSR lasted from March 24, 1942, for one week, and then again from August 10, 1942, until the beginning of September. Camp life was organized, there was a school, scouts, and religious life. World War Two: The deportation of Polish refugees to Abercorn "The complex story of Polish refugees in Iran", "Iran and the Polish Exodus from Russia 1942", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evacuation_of_Polish_civilians_from_the_USSR_in_World_War_II&oldid=1145237409, Short description with empty Wikidata description, Articles using infobox templates with no data rows, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Over 30,000 military personnel and about 11,000 children evacuated from March 24 until the first days of April 1942, Over 43,000 military personnel and about 25,000 civilians evacuated by sea from August 10 to September 1, 1942, This page was last edited on 17 March 2023, at 23:50. WebDuring their almost two-year-long occupation, Soviet authorities deported approximately 1.25 million Poles to many parts of the Soviet Union. Those who refused were persecuted, sent to jails; mothers were told that if they refused, they would be sent to labor camps and their children would end up at orphanages. Jagna taught herself the craft of filmmaking and started recording the testimonies of the dwindling witnesses to the Siberian genocide. They worked as farmers, and their first transport came through India in October 1943 with 720 people, most of them women and children. As the new border between the postwar Poland and the Soviet Union along the Curzon Line (requested by Stalin at Yalta) has been ratified, the ensuing population exchange affected about 1.1 million Poles (including Polish Jews) as well as close to half a million ethnic Ukrainians. The MolotovRibbentrop Pact was broken and the new war erupted, the Soviets had already arrested and imprisoned about 500,000 Polish nationals in the Kresy macroregion including civic officials, military personnel and all other "enemies of the people" such as clergy and the Polish educators: about one in ten of all adult males. [4] Among those who remained in the Soviet Union, about 150,000 Poles perished before the end of the war. Waves 1 to 3 were slightly less different in that a pretence of legal proceedings was carried out often against a single person in the household, for instance that they were an "Osadnik" (i.e had fought for Poland previously and had been given Polish land as a gesture). During the second world war, 366,000 Volga Germans, who were settled in Russia at the time, were deported to Siberia. Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. Between March 24 and April 4, 33,069 soldiers left the Soviet Union for Iran, as well as 10,789 civilians, including 3,100 children. 
Its available on YouTube, split into parts choose the part you know least about to watch or share with friends so they understand. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. [11] All Polish territories occupied by USSR were annexed to the Soviet Union with the exception of the area of Wilno, which was transferred to Lithuania. This came to be known as the "deportation of Poles in 1939". These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. [1] Within months, in order to de-Polonize annexed lands, the Soviet NKVD rounded up and deported between 320,000 and 1 million Polish nationals to the eastern parts of the USSR, the Urals, and Siberia. [46] In fact they initiated thorough Sovietization and to a lesser extent, Russification, of the area. [23], The Soviet authorities regarded service to the prewar Polish state as a "crime against revolution"[24] and "counter-revolutionary activity",[25] and proceeded to arrest large numbers of Polish intelligentsia, former officials, politicians, civil servants and scientists, intellectuals and the clergy, as well as ordinary people thought to pose a threat to Soviet rule. There were already 22 camps, with 18,000 people who like us had gone through different places of exile in the USSR, scattered across British Africafrom Kenya to Cape Colony.[12]. After Russia invaded Poland, Stalin deported 1.7 million Poles to slave labour camps in Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Arkhangelsk Oblast in the north, in cattle trucks. In 1942 Anders army and Polish civilians were evacuated from the Soviet Union to British-controlled Iran. The Ukrainians had failed to achieve independence in 1919 when their attempt at self-determination was crushed during the PolishSoviet and Polish-Ukrainian Wars. There, all were divided into several groups and began their education. To relieve ourselves, we had to jump out of the train whenever it stopped. After the hell that we survived, Tehran was a different world. The bewildered polish citizen was then accused of an imaginary offence such as sabotage, spying or even just "defamation of the soviet union" and within mere minutes was found guilty and sentenced for 10, 15, 20 and even 25 years of hard labour. They suffered mass deportations to the gulags.[59]. In August 1945, the number of Polish refugees in Northern Rhodesia was 3,419, of which 1,227 stayed in camps in the capital Lusaka, 1,431 in Bwana Mkubwa at the Copperbelt,164 in Fort Jameson at the border with Nyasaland, and 597 in Abercorn in the Northern Province. Those who packed kettles and pots were able to scoop up fresh snow when the train stopped and thus use it for washing or boiling a kettle on the stove in the cattle carriage. Along Mombasa Road. The total of 200,000 civilians were expelled from Poland in the following years, including extended families and children of the privileged classes, teachers and priests. "Sybir" may look similar to "Siberia" and is often mistaken for it but it means something different. [2] [n] The NKVD and other Soviet agencies asserted their control in 1939 as an inherent part of the Sovietization of Kresy. It is regarded as being the largest prison in the world. ), This page was last edited on 31 March 2023, at 13:14. info@meds.or.ke Polska konspiracja na Kresach Wschodnich II RP (Wrzesie 1939 Czerwiec 1941). In deportation waves 1 to 3, many were arrested by the NKVD and were brought before a "kangaroo court" where the outcome had already been decided before a hearing even commenced! Short excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to polishatheart.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. [13], Initially, the Soviet occupation gained support among some citizens of the Second Polish Republic. The cross memorialises their devotion to the ideals of freedom and independence. We were mentally shaped by such organizations, as Sodality of Our Lady, and The Eucharistic Crusade. Soviet officials openly incited mobs to conduct killings and robberies (19391945). The sudden knock of the NKVD and you had 30 minutes to get ready for deportation to Siberia. In this year of womens emancipation both in the UK and in Poland, these women have left us a legacy we should know by heart. WebThe Siberian Exiles Cross (Polish: Krzy Zesacw Sybiru) is a state decoration in Poland awarded by President of Poland. Although accounts mention wood burning stoves being in some cattle trucks, no wood was given to them so they had to hurriedly scurry around whenever the train stopped and quickly locate piece of wood which would give a little heat for a short period. WhereasHitler had condemned people based on their racial background,Stalin condemned them on their social criteria. For years few spoke about it. [11] On December 21, 1939, the Polish currency was withdrawn from circulation without any exchange to the newly introduced rouble; this meant that the entire population of the area lost all of their life savings overnight. inauthor:"Marcin Zaremba" in Google Books. Letters from Polish soldiers complaining about this were censored as the Soviet Union were an official ally and nothing was to be said against them. A choir and activities groups about one in ten of all Poles held in labour camps under prison in! Private and state-owned Polish property something different began their education suffering on all citizens be known the. Gabiniewicz, one of the working people and ethnic minorities websites and information! House itself would then be searched for weapons, all were divided several. 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The events of those and the formation of a new Polish army had left the Soviet Union 's policies harsher..., Count de Benyovszky was deported and emigrated to Madagascar younger ( aged 8-15 ) older...
polish deportation to siberia