In May and June 1941, the Soviets and their collaborators carried out the fourth wave of deportations of Polish citizens from occupied eastern Poland to camps, collective farms, exile villages and various outposts of the gulag deep in the USSR.
After signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, and then invading and occupying eastern Poland in 1939 - while the Germans invaded and occupied western Poland - the Soviets arrested hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens over the next two years and transported them to remote regions of Siberia, Kazakhstan and northern Russia in overcrowded cattle cars.
Most of the deportees were women and children.
Those who survived the journey were then used as slave labour, and thousands died subsequently from a combination of hunger, exhaustion and disease.
The mass deportations to what became known as nieludzka ziemia ("the inhuman land") took place in four waves between February 1940 and June 1941.
The first wave began on 10th February 1940, a few weeks before the Soviet NKVD carried out what became known as the Katyń massacre. The second wave began on 13th April 1940, when the massacre had already begun.
The first two mass deportations included the families of the Katyń massacre victims - 8000 Polish army officers, 6000 police officers and thousands of university lecturers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, civic leaders, politicians, government officials, priests and other members of the “bourgeoisie”.
The third wave took place between June and July 1940.
In 1941, after Hitler had turned on Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa, a fragile “amnesty” was declared for the Polish deportees, and approximately 120,000 of them subsequently managed to escape from the USSR in 1942 with the Anders Army. They were forced into a life of exile after the war.
Other survivors eventually made it back to communist Poland, where they were forced into silence for decades, until Poland finally regained its independence in 1989….
theartofmadeline
dededos
vaporwave
origamiaround
romaincrisis
blakekathryn
izzy806
titsay
prguitarman