On Sunday, February 16, a Holy Mass was held at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help for those who were never allowed to return from penal servitude, and for those whose graves did not even remain. Prayers were offered for the health of the survivors, so that they might tell their stories for as long as possible. As a warning.
And now, let the historians of the Institute of National Remembrance speak:
On February 10, 1940, the first mass deportation of Poles to Siberia began, carried out by the NKVD. Approximately 140,000 Polish citizens were transported deep into the Soviet Union. Many died on the way, and thousands never returned to the country. Those deported were mainly the families of military personnel, officials, forestry workers, and railway employees from the eastern regions of pre-war Poland.
“Cleansing” the Borderlands
The authorities of the USSR treated the deportations not only as a means of fighting political enemies, but also as part of the extermination of the Polish elite and, above all, as an opportunity to use thousands of people as free labor. Penal labor in the Siberian taiga, in temperatures dropping to several dozen degrees below zero, amid hunger and disease, killed many exiles. It was a deliberate and systematically carried-out crime against the Polish nation.
The beginning of mass deportations was made possible by the Soviet annexation of the eastern provinces of the Republic of Poland, sanctioned by a secret protocol attached to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939. After September 17 of that year, when the Red Army crossed Poland’s borders, terror on an unprecedented scale began in the territories it seized.
The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles was decided by the highest representatives of Soviet power—headed by Józef Stalin, NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov. Orders concerning the deportations were issued in Moscow as early as December 1939; on their basis, instructions were prepared for local NKVD units responsible for “cleansing” the western parts of the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus. The deportations were carried out according to lists of names compiled by NKVD officers in cooperation with local communists.
In Cattle Cars
Residents expelled from the Eastern Borderlands were often surprised by the Soviets at night or at dawn, and then forced to pack essential belongings and provisions as quickly as possible. The deportees, often entire families, were taken to railway stations where unheated carriages were already waiting. Overcrowding, cold, appalling sanitary conditions, and insufficient drinking water contributed to a high mortality rate during the transport, which lasted many weeks.
In February 1940, approximately 140,000 Polish citizens were deported in total—to Krasnoyarsk Krai, Komi, and the Arkhangelsk, Sverdlovsk, and Irkutsk oblasts. Those who survived the journey were condemned to slave labor, including logging and railway construction. Every day they fought for survival in Soviet camps, where, in addition to the frost, prisoners suffered from hunger, diseases caused by vermin, and repressive Soviet guards.
The mass deportations that began on February 10 were continued by the authorities of the USSR in the following months—further major deportation operations were carried out on April 13, at the turn of June and July, and in May and June 1941. In addition, the Soviets transported smaller groups of residents, numbering several hundred, from the territories of pre-war Poland.
One Million Displaced
According to estimates by the Polish government-in-exile, approximately one million civilians were sent to Siberian gulags as a result of deportations organized in 1940–1941, although Soviet documents cite 320,000 deportees. Some of them escaped from the gulags thanks to the army of General Władysław Anders, formed in the USSR after the Sikorski–Mayski Agreement.
Not all volunteers reached the locations of the units being formed, however, because the Soviets blocked their attempts. Documents confirming Polish citizenship were confiscated by the NKVD, and Poles were forced to accept Soviet documents. Another opportunity to leave Siberia came with joining the Tadeusz Kościuszko Division, formed under Moscow’s auspices and inspired by Polish communists, with Stalin’s approval; it became the nucleus of the later “People’s” Polish Army.
The deportations of the Polish population deep into the USSR in 1940–1941 were not the last. After the Red Army entered German-occupied Poland in 1944, those who experienced the harsh climate of the Siberian steppes included Home Army soldiers and civilians from territory seized by the Soviets who had been sent to the gulags.