Approximately 600 Polish refugees were taken to Abercorn in contingents. -1- [56] Pre-war Poland was portrayed as a capitalist state based on exploitation of the working people and ethnic minorities. [15] 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians were killed in the Katyn massacre,[2][19] but thousands of others were victims of NKVD massacres of prisoners in mid-1941, before the German advance across the Soviet occupation zone. They suffered mass deportations to the gulags.[59]. Amazing fact: For some, this grim hardship was a gift, not only of life, but of their humanity. The journey from Poland to Siberia to Central Asia will be told not only by Asher and Shifra Scharf but also by several other Polish Jews, each detailing a particular leg of the journey. It was a hellhungry, sick people, children in rail cars, filled with louse. [12] By this new and final arrangement often described as a fourth partition of Poland,[2] the Soviet Union secured the lands east of the rivers Pisa, Narew, Bug and San. Thousands of Poles took advantage of this, although not all managed to get out, because news did not reach them in time, before Stalin stoped it. On June 16, 2005, the website of the World Jewish Congress published very significant information that highlighted the curious coincidence of Hitler's initial anti-Semitic plans with Stalin's deportations of Jews : "The Nazis wanted to deport all Jews to the Soviet Union, a newly discovered document suggests. The chairs of Marxism-Leninism, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism, aimed at strengthening Soviet ideology, were opened as well. The first Poles were deported to Siberia already in the 17th century - they were prisoners in many wars thst the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth conducted with Moscovy, and later the However, in 2020, Russian President Valdimir Putin went as far as blaming Poland for starting World War II. -5- According to the Soviet law, all residents of the annexed area, dubbed by the Soviets as citizens of former Poland,[33] automatically acquired Soviet citizenship. Their migration began was encouraged by local noblemen, often Polish landlords, who wanted to develop their significant land-holdings in the area for agricultural use. Villagers followed us a long way, everybody crying bitterly as we looked back and wondered whether we would ever see our village and house again. [60] The events of the late 1940s amounted to a full-scale civil war according to some historians, especially in the eastern and central parts of the country (see: the Cursed soldiers). Some 25,000 Polish underground fighters, including 300 top Home Army officers, were captured by NKVD units and SMERSH operational groups in the fall of 1944. At first, they were transported to the town of Bandra, in the suburbs of Bombay, where Hanka Ordonwna took care of the kids. It must be said, that ordinary Russians were, on the whole, friendly and very sympathetic to our plight, but they had to be very discreet about it. On January 15, 1940 the Lww University was reopened; its professors started to teach in accordance with Soviet curricula. Once you have entered your email in this box and press the "Click to subscribe" black button, you will receive a confirmation email in your mailbox to activate your subscription. This book is a collection of individual stories written by survivors of the Polish genocide during the Second World War. POLES DEPORTED TO SIBERIA IN THE YEARS 1940-1945. We were brought into a region called Czelabinskaja Oblosc to a place called Czepajewka posiolek hard labour camp. In 1989, the Soviet Union apologized for its crimes against Poland. People were dying like flies. The number and placement of Polish citizens deported in February and June 1940. As a result, I fell further and further behind our group walking to the nearest tent shelter, and I dont know what would have happened to me if my mother had not found me. On top of not being able to see in the dusk, I suffered from eye infection, which caused swelling of my eyelids and heavy yellow discharge. The Soviet forces murdered almost all captured officers, and sent numerous ordinary soldiers to the Soviet Gulag. Houses made of clay, in the heart of Africa. Somehow, at some point, my brother Gustaf found me and brought me a piece of bread (his ration for the day I later learned). In 1944, the prime minister of New Zealand, Peter Fraser, agreed to take a limited number of Polish orphans and half-orphans, whose parents had died either in Soviet Union or Tehran, or whose fathers had fought at the front. Between 1944 and 1946, thousands of Polish independence fighters actively opposed the new communist regime, attacking country offices of NKVD, SMERSH and the Polish communist secret service (UB). World War Two: The deportation of Polish refugees to Abercorn camp in Northern Rhodesia. (S 6/02/Zk)", REPRESJE 1939-41 Aresztowani na Kresach Wschodnich, "Formy, skala i konsekwencje sowieckich represji wobec Polakw w latach 1939-1941", Represje 1939-41 Aresztowani na Kresach Wschodnich, "Ivan Franko National University of L'viv", The establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 By Norman Naimark, "Wyzwoliciele czy okupanci? My lungs were also affected, a condition which has dogged me all my life. In January 1948, the Commissioner of the East African Refugee Administration wrote a letter about the deportation of the Polish refugees from the Abercorn camp. Polian suggests the enclosures to the letters, so far not found, were written by Adolf Eichmann and Alois Brunner, responsible for Jewish immigration in Berlin and Vienna, respectively. The Pogrom of Ludmiwka: a silenced killing of Jews at the hands of communists, A silenced history: the communist repression against Poles who fought Nazism, a pact of those two totalitarian dictatorships, the handover by the Soviet NKVD to the Gestapo of some 4,000 German communists and Jews who had taken refuge in the USSR, In an article published by the British newspaper The Guardian, the website of the World Jewish Congress published very significant information, "Saved by deportation: An unknown odyssey of Polish Jews", Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, The murder of three Ukrainian soldiers by a Russian mercenary from the Wagner Group, AbramsX: General Dynamics presents the replacement for the M1 Abrams MBT, The day the American M-26 Pershing tank knocked out the Soviet T-34 tank in Korea, A surreal scene: Russian soldiers are captured by Ukrainians while they were sleeping, A detail of the US Army indicating that it is preparing for a long stay in Europe, The story of little Elya, who died of a heart attack in Ukraine at the age of 6, The story of Captain Wilhelm Hosenfeld: a German catholic who helped save Poles, Spain deploys an important Aeronaval Group after the passage of a Russian frigate, NORAD: this is how the great bunker of Cheyenne Mountain was built and this is how it is inside, The 7 communist and 36 Islamic regimes that most persecute Christians in 2023, The three wars of Finland between 1939 and 1945 and its strange situation in WWII, 'The Great Escape': 10 little-known historical curiosities about that excellent movie, The cowardly right and the hysterical left, '27 Minutes', an excellent short film about one of the crimes committed by ETA terrorists. There are certain moments in ones life that stay in ones mind forever. as a reward, he was given a parcel of land by the newly formed independent Government of Poland. In 1941 Joseph Stalin The Jews who were deported to Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR, and especially those who lost their lives in that deportation, deserve to be remembered and honored and deserve justice just like the Jews murdered by the Nazis. Lww University was reorganized in accordance with the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools. [19], The first Polish refugees came to Palestine in summer 1942. The first transport of prisoners to the Auschwitz extermination camp on June 14, 1940. By then we were very frightened and crying uncontrollably my father white as a sheet. We were very poor, there were no jobs, kids had their classes in the open, there were no books." If we examine the war in terms of the Holocaust, why should Stalin's strategic actions be exempt from moral interrogation?" There was a mast with a huge Polish flag, and the White Eagle on the gate."[12]. Lww University and many other schools were reopened soon, but they were to operate as Soviet institutions rather than continue their former legacy. During the second evacuation, 69,247 persons left the Soviet Union, including 25,501 civilians (9,633 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. 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. In August 1942, two schools were created, for younger (aged 8-15) and older scouts. The fourth and final wave occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000. The government of Mexico did not finance their staymoney came from the funds of a special Polish-British-American committee. It is a drama that we still remember and which remains an unhealed wound for us to this day, he added. 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. A very appropriate way of qualifying the crime committed by Stalin against those hundreds of thousands of Jews, sending them to remote places and subjecting us to hardships that led many to death. A silenced history: the communist repression against Poles who fought Nazism, The handing over of Jews by the Soviet NKVD to the Gestapo. Young as I was, in my mind I resisted. As I have already said, my father was made to work in mines, mining mainly malachite where, on one occasion, he sustained a bad accident. [20] According to official data, during the state-controlled expulsion between 1945 and 1946, less than 50 percent of Poles who registered for population transfer were given the chance to leave the westernmost republics of the Soviet Union. If today it is very necessary to continue remembering the abominable crimes of Nazism against the Jewish people -especially in view of the resurgence of antisemitism in our society, now disguised as "antizionism"-, also it is to rescue from oblivion the crimes committed by communism against the same people, crimes that do not deserve to be presented, under any circumstances, as a "salvation", since their typology corresponds to some of the the most horrendous crimes that exist. In the end unable to bear it any longer, I crawled on to the floor of the bus and stayed there until we miraculously reached Teheran. 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. Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Again with only a cast iron round stove in the middle. While the overall experiences of the survivors have commonalities, certain details of their stories are uniquely different. Between 1939 and 1941, Stalin was Nazi collaborator number one. After the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland, it had been assigned to Germany in the treaty on borders and friendship in September 1939. Leer ms, A crime committed during the alliance between Hitler and Stalin in 1939-1941. Other solders rushed through the house looking for hidden arms. Forty-five new faculty members were assigned to Lww, transferred from other institutions of Soviet Ukraine, mainly the Kharkiv and Kiev universities. The main street of the camp was named after General Tadeusz Br-Komorowski. In the second stage of evacuation from the interior, more than 43,000 military personnel and about 25,000 civilians left with General Wadysaw Anders across the Caspian Sea to Iran. Hamtramck, MI 48212-3437, 8994 S Kasson St MY STORY AS REMEMBERED FROM THE DISTANCE OF. -2- Still, thousands of distraught Poles remained there, sent to kolkhozs. This action largely nullified the earlier political gains from the land reform as the peasants generally did not want to join the Kolkhoz farms, nor to give away their crops for free to fulfill the state-imposed quotas, which undercut nearly everyone's material needs. A short while later, we boarded buses and were driven terrified of heights, so it was a nightmare journey for me. I do not recall why we did not get any help from anybody. For any other comments, please Contact Us. Its estimated that Polish deportees were held captive in the USSR on average for 66 months, meaning that the average sum to be received by the survivors could amount to PLN 13,200, or around EUR 3000. I was just a skeleton, simply skin and bones, and I lost touch with my family for quite a while. My mother, elder brother and sister were made to work on the surface of the mines, and my brother Gustaf and I, being the youngest two, were forced to attend Russian school, where indoctrination procedure was put in hand. Entdecke Eine polnische Frauenerfahrung im Zweiten Weltkrieg - 9781350178090 in groer Auswahl Vergleichen Angebote und Preise Online kaufen bei eBay Kostenlose Lieferung fr viele Artikel! 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. The tuition was abolished, as together with the institution's Polonophile traditions, this had prevented most of the rural Ukrainophone population from attending. [48] The result of the staged voting was to legitimize the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. These first deportations were made when Hitler and Stalin still maintained their alliance (Photo: Instytut Pamici Narodowej). [3][5], Approximately 100,000 Polish citizens were arrested during the two years of Soviet occupation. [49], Simultaneously Soviet authorities tried to remove traces of Polish history in the area by eliminating much of what had connections to the Polish state or even Polish culture in general. There, all were divided into several groups and began their education. Children were taken care of by the Polish Red Cross and residents of Bombay. Soviet propaganda claimed that the unfair treatment of non-Poles by the Second Polish Republic justified its dismemberment. [18] In late 1942 and early 1943, Polish camps in Iran were located at Tehran, Isfahan, Mashhad, and Ahvaz. The adults were uneasy and afraid of the unknown, but us, the children, were happy for an adventure. As a result of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland (as agreed by the Nazis and Soviets in their It has been seventy years since as many as 2 million Poles were deported against their will to some of the most inhospitable regions in the world: Siberia, Kazakhstan, and parts of Soviet Asia. [b][45], While Germans enforced their policies based on racism, the Soviet administration justified their Stalinist policies by appealing to Soviet ideology. Polish Children's Camp was financed by the government of New Zealand, with help from Polish Government in Exile, based in London. 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. La ley establece que podemos almacenar cookies en su dispositivo si son estrictamente necesarias para el funcionamiento de este sitio. [9][10] An estimated 150,000 Polish citizens were killed by Soviet repressions. But this should not make us forget a fact: Articles 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court considers deportations crimes against humanity and war crimes. Thus we all became separated from each other, and I remember crying myself to sleep every night, as it was the first time in my life that I was apart from my mother and the rest of the family. You will not receive any email related to other purposes. It is a miracle that we survived, with thousands dead.[12]. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. I was always. Wiesawa Paskiewicz, who stayed at Kolhapur, wrote: "Our daily activities were marked by school, church and scouting. Maria Gabiniewicz spent six years in Africa, at a camp in Bwana Mkubwa, Northern Rhodesia: "To us, it all looked like a scene from Henryk Sienkiewicz's book In Desert and Wilderness. [41][42] They began confiscating, nationalising and redistributing all private and state-owned Polish property. 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