Irena Makowiecka (nèe Glowacka) was 9 years old when the Second World War started.

Irena Makowiecka (nèe Glowacka) was 9 years old when the Second World War started.

I was born in a small town near Tarnopol in eastern Poland and I spent the first seven years of my life there. My mother, who came from Warsaw, always said that she spent the happiest years of her life in Grzymalow. This part of Poland is called Podole. It is a very fertile land with black soil. My father was in the police force but we had a bit of land too. We used to go there for Sunday walks and I remember the orchard with cherries and apples, the bubbling brook, lots of forget-me-nots and the huge lilac tree under the kitchen window. In spring their fragrance was over powering. I have always associated lilac with Poland. My father didn't work the farm, somebody else did that. It was share farming but we would get fruit and, in autumn, potatoes and carrots. The wheat went to the mill and we would get a bag of flour or a bag of porridge oats whenever we needed. When the war started all those products were in the mill and we couldn't get them because all our property was confiscated. The shops were empty and we found ourselves without any food resources.

The Build-up to War
The Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933 and in March 1934 Pilsudski signed a treaty of non-aggression and friendship with Germany. This was far from an alliance since it intended to do no more than lessen the tension which had remained since the corridor to the Baltic and the creation of Danzig as a free city in 1918. Germany had consistently maintained its interests in land west of the corridor.

Hitler started to threaten Poland, demanding access to the Free City of Danzig and a corridor between Germany and Danzig through Polish territory. It was only an excuse to start the war. While Josef Pilsudski, the Polish marshal and a good politician, was in charge, he gave a feeling of security to the general public. When he died in May 1935 there was nobody of equal stature to take his place. There was a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling of doom. Everybody was waiting for the war to start. It seemed to be inevitable. Austria was taken by Hitler in March 1938, followed by Czechoslovakia in March 1939. We were next on the list. Poland didn't prepare for war because we were told not to provoke the Germans by arming, to be weak so they wouldn't have that as an excuse for attacking. That was the rationale of Neville Chamberlain: don't provoke anybody, cooperate with Hitler and he will cooperate with you. So, while war was in the air, no one expected Russia to attack Poland because we had a pact of non-aggression with Russia which Marshal Pilsudski had signed in 1934. (Irene Makowiecka)

By October 1938, when Hitler renewed his demands for the 'return' of Danzig and territorial rights in the Polish corridor it was clear that conciliation was not working. Over the following months the Polish government began to mobilise its armed forces. Stanislawa Jutrzenka-Trzebiatowska (Adamska at the time) remembered how her husband was called to duty three months before Germany invaded Poland.

It was part of a secret mobilisation in which many men, mainly professional men, were taken. For three months I did not know where he was; then he sent me a letter telling me that he would be free for two days. I received a telegram to meet him in Pinsk at the Hotel Pina. We expected to have these two days to ourselves. Two hours later he received a telephone call from his superiors calling him back. It was the sixth of September 1939. This was the last time I saw him.

Under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a defensive alliance signed by Hitler and Stalin on 23 August 1939, a 'secret additional protocol' agreed that the two powers would carve Poland up between them. The Soviet sphere of influence was to include Finland, the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, the Rumanian province of Bessarabia and eastern Poland while the German sphere of influence would include Lithuania and western Poland. Poland was thus divided along the Bug River - the Curzon Line of 1920. Hitler invaded the west of Poland on 1 September 1939. Urszula Paszkowska (nèe Trella), who was 12 years old when war broke out, recounted the situation which confronted her family at the time:

My father died as a result of post-influenza complications two weeks before war broke out and my mother moved us back to her parents in Drohobycz. Drohobycz was a district city in what was then eastern Poland. It was famous for the oil refinery which was the largest in Poland, and one of the largest in Eastern Europe.

As far as the war was concerned, we were all fearful of it. We knew that the Germans were encircling us. They were not only on the western and northern borders, where East Prussia was, but also in Czechoslovakia, so they were to the south of us. When we first heard about the war it was a shock to us, but we were hoping that our army would be able to withstand the German invasion. Little did we know the disparity in the armaments of both armies or that there was a secret clause in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which Russia and Germany had signed in August 1939. We did not know that the Soviet Union would attack us from the east.

The oil refinery in Drohobycz was bombed a few days after the beginning of the war. The oil burned for a few days and then they bombed our city a second time, not far away from where we were living. First of all the German army came into Drohobycz. They stayed there for about a week and in that time the lorries were transporting goods from the stores westward. Then on the seventeenth of September the Russian army crossed the eastern border of Poland and started to advance. The Germans moved back and the Russians came in and the same thing happened again. The lorries started going to the east.

According to historian Neal Ascherson (1987, pp. 90-1), at half past three in the morning of 17 September 1939, the Polish Ambassador in Moscow was informed that as the Polish state had ceased to exist (which was not true), steps had become necessary to protect the Ukrainian and Byelorussian minorities in the 'former' Polish territories. An hour later, Soviet troops crossed the frontier. There was little resistance to the invasion, the eastern border being almost unprotected. Irena Makowiecka, reflecting upon the situation as it appeared to many Polish civilians, elucidated:

The Russians claimed that they came as an ally, as helpers, but as soon as they came they disarmed the Polish army who were moving east, away from the German panzer divisions. The Soviets took the retreating army as prisoners of war. Only a small number managed to cross the frontier through Rumania and then on to France, following the Polish government.

As the Soviet forces moved across eastern Poland to a demarcation line along the Rivers Bug and San it became clear that a fourth partition of Poland was taking place. Some individuals from all the major political parties in Poland, including President Ignacy Moscicki, managed to escape via Rumania. These people reassembled in Paris where a coalition government under the lead of General Sikorski, also the head of the remaining Polish army, was formed. Seventy-eight tons of gold from the Polish state bank was also transported to the Rumanian port of Constanza, where it was then taken by a British ship to Turkey, by train to Beirut and from there transported to France by a French cruiser.

The new government was recognised by the British, French and Americans but not by the USSR, which had not yet declared war. Sikorski and his aides had to flee when the Germans attacked France in May 1940. They took up residence in London, which remained their headquarters for the remainder of the war. From this base the Polish government in exile operated for the duration of the war, financed by the state gold which had been smuggled out of Poland in September 1939.
Chapter 2 - Deportation
After the invasion of 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union proceeded to annex territory inhabited by almost 13 000 000 people and which constituted more than half of Poland's post 1918 territory (Królikowski, 1983, p.17). Around 5000 000 of these people were ethnic Poles, the rest were predominantly Ukrainians and Byelorussians. Many Poles, both at the time and even at the time of writing, saw this 'stab in the back' as 'the realisation of a coldly planned design, a natural expression of Russia's attitude to the existence of an independent Poland ever since the Russian state had been born' (Ascherson, 1987, p. 92). Events over the next few years justified the belief that Stalin hoped to 'obliterate the Polish nation both physically and culturally' (Ascherson, 1987, p. 94).

Deportation of Officers
The Soviet authorities carried out an immediate round of deportations and arrests, principally of Polish leaders and those in government posts. In 1948 the Ministry of justice in London estimated that 200 000 Polish soldiers were arrested between 1939 and 1940, with at least 180 000 ending up as Soviet prisoners of war. A further 25 000 were forcibly drafted into the Soviet army, or taken as forced labour (Ministry of Justice, 1949). More recent figures suggest that over the remaining months of 1939, the Red Army rounded up an estimated quarter of a million Polish army personnel and transported them to the USSR (Walters, 1988, pp. 275-6).

Map - Approximate routes of the Polish exiles

Out of that total, between 12 000 and 15 000 officers were interned in camps near Katyn, Ostaskow and Starobel'sk. Relatives received intermittent letters from them until the spring of 1940. The occupying German army in April 1943 discovered the Katyn officers in a forest graveyard. According to Ascherson (1987, p. 123), no trace of the 4000 officers at the Starobel'sk camp nor the 6500 prisoners at Ostaskow has yet been found. Although Polish research in the post communist years is bringing to light more information about localities where NKVD (the secret police, now known as the KGB) victims, including Polish officers, were 'buried', nothing appears to have been published in English. The silence and uncertainty which surrounded the fate of these Polish officers left an enduring, if often understated, impact upon their friends and relatives. Stanislawa Jutrzenka-Trzebiatowska (Adamska), whose husband had joined the army three months before war was declared, summarised the events surrounding his disappearance with simple candour:

I received a note from my husband from Rostov, in Russia, where he was taken with other members of the Polish army. The note was brought to me by a man who came back from Russia. The ordinary soldiers came home but all the others were kept in the Soviet Union. I received only one more letter from him asking for boots and a belt. I found out that he was dead after I arrived in Australia. My brother sent me a book from Poland with all the names of those killed, Lista Katynska, which I still have. My husband's name is there, Henryk Adamski.

Similarly, Helena Lancucka, a school teacher who had been born in southern Poland in 1904 but had moved to Polesie in eastern Poland with her husband, recalled:

Life was very unsettled in Poland before the war. My husband was called up before war started, so he was already on the front when war started. He said it was a very dangerous time and that I should stay together with my family - my Mum and my sister - because he had to go to the army. In February 1940 I had a letter from my husband saying that he was in Kosielsk camp. We sent a letter to that address but never got an answer. My husband was killed in Katyn. For a long time I did not know.

The disappearance of the Polish officers had no less an impact upon their children, even if they were very young at the time. The account given by Bogdan Harbuz, who was only a boy of 6 when war broke out, hints at a persisting sense of injustice and disbelief shared by many of the participants whose fathers 'disappeared' during the war:

During World War One, my father was an officer in the Polish army, so in the inter-war period he was a reservist. Just before World War Two started he was called up. First he went to Warsaw as general staff but when the general staff started being evacuated across the border he stayed in Poland as a front line officer. He was taken prisoner by the Russians, and marched to a place called Kozel'sk. There were three prisoner of war camps for Polish officers: Kozel'sk, Starobel'sk and Ostaskow. For the first few months he was allowed to send letters to us in Poland. Then, when we were taken to Siberia in April 1940, we lost contact with our father altogether.

In 1942 the Polish government in exile asked Stalin what happened to the officers but he could not give any definite answer. Then the Germans uncovered the mass graves in Katyn so at that time we found out that between some 12 000 and 15 000 Polish officers were executed by a revolver bullet to the back of the head. But we only found out after the war that our father was murdered there. For many years, even after the war, I still could not believe it - not until I saw his name on the list of officers that were killed there.

As the Red Army focused its attention on the 1939 'Winter War' in Finland, there was a pause in the deportations while a 'sovietisation' of Polish institutions was carried out. Rigged elections took place in November which produced dummy assemblies of Ukrainians and Byelorussians who voted unanimously for their incorporation into the Soviet Union. There was some land reform and nationalisation, and Poles were removed from official posts and often from their own homes.

By February 1940, Stalin turned his attention to Poland once again as the need to secure his western front became more pressing. Polish families in the occupied zones were driven from their homes and packed into unheated cattle trucks which slowly headed for Siberia and the Soviet far east. Figures produced by the Ministry of Justice in London in 1949 suggested that around 1660 000 Polish soldiers and civilians were deported to the USSR (Stalin and the Poles, Ministry of Justice, London 1949).

With the gradual opening up of Soviet archives since 1989, figures are being revised by Polish scholars. Zofia Ciesielska, in a 1992 article, cites the following as more accurate, but still tentative, estimations. Approximately 12 000 Poles were interned in camps in Latvia before being transported to the USSR. Under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact 210 000-230 000 Polish citizens were automatically considered Soviet citizens and were incorporated into the Soviet Army in 1940-41. According to various sources, between 250 000-350 000 Polish civilians were arrested between 1939 and 1941 and were taken to gulags, hard labour camps throughout Siberia, Kazakhstan and Arkhangel'sk districts. Many of these people were lost without trace. Approximately 336 000 Polish refugees who were running from the German army were also deported to the USSR in June 1940.
Civilian Deportations
In addition, between 1200 000 and 1500 000 permanent inhabitants of eastern Poland were taken to the USSR in the process of four deportations. Members of the 'General Langfitt Group' were represented in all of these deportations. Halina Juszczyk, who was a child of eight, was in the first block of transports.

On the 17th of September 1939, the Russians crossed the border. As my family were living only sixty kilometres from the border they were at our place at six o'clock in the evening. My father said goodbye to us that day and he went to the little town Niechniewicze. He never came back because they arrested him and all the other ex-servicemen from our district, including our Uncle Ludwig Majcher, my mother's brother. They were in prison in Nowogródek for three months and then they were deported to Russia. We don't know where and we never heard from them.
We went back home and it was a dreadful time. We had soldiers coming into the house, putting my mother against the wall, wanting to shoot her. We children cried. We didn't know what was happening. Then my mother had a nervous breakdown because she couldn't go on alone. I remember her sitting on the bed staring blankly at the wall. We didn't know what to do. She didn't cook for us. But there was very little to cook because the Russian soldiers took most things. A few days after the Russians came my grandmother came to stay with us. She provided great support to us because my mother was in a state of despair and unable to perform her normal tasks.
Then at two o'clock in the morning on 10 February 1940 they came knocking on the door with guns. There were two NKVD people with guns and some local sympathisers. They told us to pack up and be ready in two hours. We were four children. My sister Krystyna was only eleven, I was eight and a half, my brother was four and my sister was two. We all cried. We didn't know what was happening. It was very cold.
The locals that came into our house that night took pity on us and wrapped some of our possessions into bed covers for us to take on the sledge. They told us that we were going to be transferred to another district but we knew that wasn't true. We travelled for a few hours to the nearest town of Baranowicze and waited there about three days for the whole transport to be gathered together. Then the train started to travel towards Russia. This was the very first transport from our district.
Elizabeth Patro's (nèe Nahajska) family were also sent into exile in the first round of transportations. Although Elizabeth was only an innocent child of 5, she has very distinct flashes of memory about the night of 10 February 1940 because it was the night which started an 'endless limbo of lost souls'.

It was an intensely cold winter night, through a slightly ajar door, floated a soft stream of candle light, voices of my father and Uncle Janek and the quiet sobbing of my mother. Iza, my elder sister, tossed restlessly in her bed, and further, near the large window, Tolek, my younger brother, was fast asleep.
I was fully awake. Laying scared and motionless I listened to the continuous howling of the dogs, wailing of women and screams of children. At first very faint and far, far away, then closer and closer, until the tumult was upon all of us. Screaming we jumped out of our beds and ran toward the kitchen.
There was a very loud banging on the entrance door, then a gruff voice in Russian: 'Otwieraj!' (Open). A gust of freezing wintry air filled the room at the entry of three burly 'Saldats'. One of them jumped toward my father, pushed him against the wall and thrust his bayonet under his chin. 'Stoi!' (stand still) he shouted.
The second soldier was ordering my sobbing mother to pack: 'You have fifteen minutes so hurry'. The third guarded the door. Suddenly our St Bernard, Sultan, appeared. With his huge bulk, bristled-up coat and ferocious look he was growling menacingly at the soldier. Very, very slowly the saldat lifted his gun, aimed and fired. 'Sultan, Sultan!' we screamed, the dog managed one step back, gave one long yelp then fell heavily into the soft white snow.
Mother slowly went to the bedroom, took a large quilt and threw it over the carcass of our beloved dog. She did not cry. We children just stood and watched as the white quilt and white winter snow became slowly stained by bright red blood.
Chapter 2 - Deportation (continued)
Kazimierz Sosnowski was 11 years old, but still remembers the episodes leading to deportation clearly:

In January 1940 the NKVD arrested my father three times for interrogation. The first time they released him after a few hours. The second time he was with them half a day, and the third time they kept him for a day and a half. When he came home he said he was not going back to them because they were trying to make him an informer. He took some clothes and escaped from Polesie to Warsaw on 15 January 1940.
On 10 February the NKVD came at around midnight with rifles to wake us up. They put all four of us against the wall and started searching the house for documents, arms, ammunition, anything. I remember looking down the barrel of the rifle wondering when the bullet would come out. When they finished searching, the house was in a shambles. Everything was upside down and all over the floor. They told us to dress and took us to a certain place for interrogation. There was no interrogation. They took us to a place where they were grouping people before taking them to the train. Everybody else had clothes and food. We didn't have any.
On the way to the station we had to pass our house and the Russian soldiers allowed Mother to go inside and pick up whatever she could. When she got inside, she found that one of the local Byelorussians had put all our hams and bacon on the bed. My mother said, 'These belong to me', but they were too heavy for her to carry. He said, 'Your reign here is over now. These belong to me'. They started arguing but a Russian soldier intervened and told the local to carry those things to the sleigh. Mother packed whatever she could in some bedding but we had no time to prepare ourselves for the harsh winter. We were very unfortunate. We struck bad people.
The second wave of transports, totalling around 160 trains, departed in April 1940 and consisted of an estimated 320 000 people, mostly the families of men who had been arrested because they were members of the intelligentsia or had once been in the Polish military. The Trella family were among this group:

Not long after the Russians arrived in our city the people had to vote to either approve the annexation of eastern Poland - they called it western Ukraine - or for approval of the communist regime. I am not sure which it was. Nobody really had any choice because they would be arrested straight away if they voted incorrectly.
On 10 February 1940, when the first wave of deportation was taking place, we heard that sugar would be available at a particular place so we went there in the middle of the cold winter night to queue. While we were waiting a cart came down the road and one of the women in it yelled, 'Why are you bothering? We are being taken to Russia and you will all be taken too'. That was our first inkling of things to come but we as a family never expected that we would be deported. Still, because of the rumours every night, I would wake up if a lorry went by and listen to see if it was stopping in front of our house.
Then, on 13 April, in the middle of the night I was dreaming that we were being deported and in the dream I heard the knocking on our door. In that instant I woke up and the knocking was real. There were about six people. The man in charge came into the bedroom and read the official communique which said that we were an undesirable element in eastern Poland and we were being transported to the Soviet Union. They never told us what part of Russia they were going to take us to. One of the ordinary soldiers came into the bedroom and stressed that we should take the warm things so my mother had a large wooden chest and she packed practically all our clothes. They gave us only an hour to get ready but as the lorry that was taking us took longer we had time to pack all our clothes and some food. The whole household was going, including my grandparents. My Aunt wasn't there, which was fortunate. She was able to send us food parcels in the first few months of our exile. (Urszula Paszkowska nèe Trella)
Wieslawa Paszkiewicz (nèe Wojtasiewicz) was twelve and a half years old when her father was arrested on 22 February 1940. He was a public servant and they never heard what happened to him. Three weeks later, Wieslawa and her mother Apolonia were deported from Lwów.

On 13 April 1940 many thousands of mothers and children whose fathers had been arrested were taken. We only had half an hour to pack. The soldier who came told us that we would die in Russia but my mother put everything she could in sheets and blankets, packed like a swag. In one night six long trains went on to Russia from Lwów and in every single cattle truck there were fifty or sixty people. I don't know how many thousands went in just one night.
The third block of deportations took place over June and July of 1940 and consisted of some 240 000 people, including families of men who had been arrested and refugees from central and western Poland. For example, Tadeusz Dobrostanski's father, Jozef, was editor-in-chief of a daily newspaper, Kurier Baltycki in Gdynia on the Baltic Sea. Jozef was arrested in June 1940 and subsequently deported to Rybinsk near Vologda. Tadeusz Dobrostanski explained how his father attempted to enhance the safety of his young family against the advancing German army.

My father was a journalist, so he was very aware of the situation. Three days before the war started he sent my mother, brother and myself to our relations in Lwów, in south-eastern Poland. He thought we would be safer there because we were escaping the German blitzkrieg which started close to where we were living. My father joined the army and after the 1939 campaign was over, he survived and joined us in Lwów. When the Russians entered Poland on 17 September they started introducing Russian laws and regulations. The NKVD were very powerful: they knew everything and many people disappeared all of a sudden. One night at about one o'clock they knocked on our door and arrested my father because he was an officer in the Polish army. They gave him a short time and assured my crying mother it was only a short interrogation and that he would be sent home. Of course he wasn't and three or four days later, on a Sunday afternoon, as we returned from church, they came to arrest the three of us.
They gave us very little time to pick up our belongings. We were put on a lorry where there were other unfortunates already waiting. While we were driving to the station strange people, realising that we were deportees, were tossing whatever food they could on that lorry. We all shared that later on, on the train. We were taken to the railway station where they put us into cattle carriages, roughly sixty people in each. It was 26 June 1940 when we started the journey. We knew they were taking us east but that was all.
Finally in May and June 1941, just a short time before Germany attacked the USSR, the NKVD managed to round up another 200 000 families of men arrested after April 1940, as well as many city intelligentsia, railway workers and foresters. While these families had so far been 'saved' from the hardships of life in the outer reaches of the Soviet Union, Wladyslawa Smenda's brief account of life in Soviet occupied Poland speaks for itself:

When the war started in 1939 1 was left to teach but my husband was arrested by the Russians. He was in Stanislawow in prison and during these months I could visit him and give him small parcels and money so he could buy something in the prison. He was tried as an officer in a closed court because he fought in the 1921 war between Poland and Russia and was given the death sentence. The war was about the eastern border. I hired a lawyer who appealed and his sentence was changed to life with hard labour. This was in 1940. I don't know what happened to him but the last money I sent came back. That is all I know. I tried to find out if he was one of the men at Katyn.
A few months later, on 22 May 1941, the NKVD came at night and told us we were to be resettled. They took me and the children to Russia. My son, Janusz, was nearly ten, and Teresa was six. When we were in the cattle wagons, in the train being taken to Krasnoyarsk in Russia, the war between the Germans and Russia started. They broke the alliance between them. The train was needed for the soldiers, so we were unloaded and put in a field surrounded by soldiers. We were women and children. Lots of children. No men. Then we were taken to the station on lorries. It was awful.
Teresa Sosnowska (nèe Zebrowska) was the eldest daughter in a farming family in the Lomza district, east of the Vistula River, at the western point of the Russian invasion.
In 1939 when the war broke out our father was mobilised and was taken with the Polish army to Kozel'sk by the Russians. That was the camp where the officers, judges, and intelligentsia, were killed in Katyn. Only a very few were left. Father escaped by saying that he was not an officer, just a railway worker, so they let him out. A week after he returned home a neighbour told him that he was on the NKVD list so he went away. After that we never had a night's sleep because they were always coming around our buildings, interrogating my mother. Even my little three-year-old brother was questioned. My mother used to take us to her mother's place, quite a long way away, to visit father who was in that area. Only my elder brother and myself were allowed to see him, not my younger siblings, just in case they told the wrong people without understanding. We didn't see my father again after late 1940 or early 1941.
We expected to be deported one day because of our father and because there were a lot of people being deported from our area. We knew what to expect because my cousin's aunt was arrested and we had word from them. We were arrested in June 1941. We children were sleeping in the barn because it was a hot night. My elder brother escaped through a window. We had to go inside where they counted us. One of the Russians who came to arrest us had been billeted with us a few months before and thanks to him we were able to pack many more things than most people. He went through every little nook and told us what to take. We had ham and sausages and shpec4 because my uncle had slaughtered a pig not long before. They kept telling us not to worry, that we were going to join father. That made my mother very worried because she thought that he must have been arrested.
In the morning, they took us to the station where we were surrounded by Russian soldiers. They kept us there while they tried to find my brother and, because of that, my grandmother had time to bake us some bread and bring that to us, with a sack of potatoes. So we had a chance to say goodbye to my grandmother but they didn't find my brother. That evening, on 20th of June 1941, we were taken away. It was just two days before the war started between Germany and the Soviet Union.
These were among the last transports to leave Poland for the Soviet Union, where they joined many of their Polish compatriots as forced labourers in mines and lumber camps near the Arctic Circle, or to be dumped on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Over forty years later Ryszard Pawlowski reflected on the bemusement these events caused him as a child:

We were taken because my father worked for the government and because of his position in the army. He had also fought in the previous war against the Russians. I was only six or seven years old and my brother was younger. I don't see what harm we could have done to them and why they had to deport us but that was their policy. Who knows why it happened. It is really hard to understand why they were deporting children and women. I suppose we were just victims of war.
Chapter 3 - Exile in the USSR
The treatment of the Poles by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 is still an unfamiliar story to many people. At the time, news of what was going on barely reached the west, and later in the war, when Britain and the United States became allies of the USSR, discussion of the episode was discouraged as tactless. Ascherson (1987, p.94) has observed that the true story only emerged in fragments in the post-war years, and has been 'overshadowed by the more spectacular and better-publicised savageries of the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rest of Europe'. Yet, it was no less brutal or cold blooded. As Anne Applebaum (1994, p.14) observed in an article in the Age:

Almost no one in the west considers (Stalin's) crimes to have been evil in the same visceral way that they feel Hitler's crimes to have been evil. Until recently, many argued that there was no way to commemorate Stalin's victims, because there was no proof of their identity or their numbers. This was always a somewhat disingenuous argument - witnesses and written memoirs abound.
Even if there is still a lack of interest in Stalin's victims there is much to be learned from those who survived their unwilling encouners with the regime, both for the knowledge of oppressive regimes which their stories offer and for an understanding of the sheer magnitude of human endurance in the face of war.

In particular, the strength of the women stands out. Faced with the forced removal of husbands, fathers and brothers, often without the opportunity to offer a farewell and fearing the worst for their future, they showed great courage. The loneliness, the seemingly impossible task of feeding and protecting their children, the desperation in losing contact with husbands and families, and the physical endurance needed to carry out work for which they were ill equipped are all things most of us can barely imagine. The children too were forced to take on tasks and responsibilities far beyond their years. That so many survived the brutal journeys which were ahead of them is a true testament of their faith and strength.

The Journeys to the USSR
The cattle trucks into which the Polish deportees were loaded were headed for different destinations thousands of kilometres away in the depths of the Soviet Union. The distances covered in the course of these transportations can be hard to visualise, even when they are plotted on a map of the former Soviet Union. All of the transportations took their human cargo to various kolhoz, or collective farms, west of the Ural Mountains into the forest, north into the Arkhangel'sk district, into the tundra and marshlands of Siberia and south west to Kazakhstan and Kirghistan on the steppes of Central Asia. Lucjan Królikowski, a young Polish seminarian who was transported to Arkhangel'sk, maintains that by deporting and dispersing the Poles over these vast territories, the intention of the Soviet government was 'to accelerate their assimilation into the local element and thereby make it impossible for them to organise' (Królikowski, 1983, pp. 16-17).

None of the deportees were informed of their destination beforehand or told how long they might expect to be cooped up on the journey. Bogdan Harbuz remembered how his family were driven to the station:

We could see thousands and thousands of other people in the same predicament. We were all loaded on to cattle trucks, which were then closed before the transport started off for Russia. At the same time hundreds of other transports from the different parts of Poland under Russian domination started towards the same destination - Siberia. Some people got there in a week or two weeks but our transport went at a very slow pace: the trip took approximately five to six weeks. In all that time we were given no food and very little water and, because of that, quite a few people died. At the sidings we saw heaps of bodies from the previous transports lying piled up under the snow.
Królikowski (1983, p. 17) summarised the situation, 'Hunger, disease, dirt and exhaustion decimated the exiles along the way. Most of the victims were among the weakest, the elderly, but little children also died en masse …' during these lengthy journeys. Several people described how deportees in the cattle trucks tried to bolster up their spirits as they left their beloved homeland. For example, Jerzy Mazak recounted the chaos at the station as crowds milled around outside:

there were people coming and going, noise and crying as families were separated. Then, a significant thing happened when the doors were shut. People started praying and singing hymns. That went on for the whole trip. We stopped for other wagons to join. It took seventeen days to reach Kazakhstan. During the trip people were sick and it was cold. When we made stops there was boiling water to make some tea and people were delegated to go out for provisions, bread and soup. We had very little food. At times we would pull up alongside another train which held prisoners of war and people would call out to find out who was on the train. People were looking for their loved ones. They were dramatic scenes. Being a child, I wouldn't have had the full understanding.
In a similar vein, Urszula Paszkowska recalled that when their train stopped in Lwów, they were greeted by an 'amazing sight'. The station was:

covered with a multitude of people, mainly youngsters, who had heard about the deportation. Many of the young Polish boys sneered at the convoys of Russian soldiers. The soldiers looked helpless because even if they had started shooting, they couldn't have shot the thousands of people who were there. We were given our first meal there, a bucket of hot soup, and then we proceeded eastwards. As our train started rolling, the whole carriage started singing religious songs. When we reached the border, the difference between the two areas was massive. In Poland the fields were small. The countryside looked like a chess board. When we crossed the border it was just vast areas of dark soil. In some parts there were beetroots or other crops still not collected from the previous year. The Polish countryside looked somehow cheerful where the Russian one was very depressing.
Memories of the train journey to the Soviet Union remain strongly etched in the minds of most people, unless they were very young or became sick on the journey east. Elizabeth Patro, reflecting upon a young child's memory of the journey east, has 'vague recollections of dark overcrowded wagons, pangs of hunger, the thirst and the stench, long endless journeys, pine forests, freezing cold, snow, snow, snow, then the strange country of Russia, its language, its people'. In a similar vein, Zenon Zebrowksi, who was barely 4 years old at the time his family were deported in 1941, describes his memories of these years as 'underexposed snapshots, dark, with not too much detail. There is no continuity. For instance, going to Russia I remember seeing the forests from the train, going through mountains and tunnels. There was no sign of habitation'.

The conditions of travel were uniformly abysmal, made worse by the length of time people were shut in the trains as they traversed huge distances across the Soviet Union. The time people spent locked in the confined, unhygienic trains varied according to their destination. In all reported cases, each cattle truck was loaded with fifty to sixty people, indiscriminately packed together in trucks lined with planks on which they sat and slept throughout the journey. In some transports there were complete families but for the most part the transports consisted predominantly of women and children. Generally, there were only small ventilation slots to serve as windows, and the carriages were frequently scaled until the train passed the border into the Soviet Union. Some cattle trucks contained a small stove, although fuel was scarce. A hole in the floor served as a latrine. When they were available, blankets or sheets were placed around the hole in an effort to maintain a degree of privacy, but this was not always possible.

It took us two weeks to reach our destination, Arkhangel'sk. I remember when they first opened the cattle truck and the guards said we could relieve ourselves, men women and children all together, squatting by the train. There was no shelter so it was very embarrassing but towards the end of the journey no one was paying any attention any more. It had to be accepted as it was. (Kazimierz Sosnowski)
The supply of food varied from transport to transport. Where the deportees were fortunate enough to be given food by the Russian authorities, it generally consisted of buckets of watery soup or the occasional cabbage pie. In many instances, no food or water was supplied and the deportees had to rely on whatever they had been able to pack in the brief hours before being taken from their homes.

They opened the doors perhaps twice, to give us a couple of buckets of drinking water and what they called a fish soup which was in fact boiled water with sliced onions and herring heads floating in it. We were really dependent on the food which we managed to take for that journey. That was it. (Tadeusz Dobrostanski)
Irena Makowiecka, who was deported in April 1940 with her mother and three siblings, recounts:

There were only women and children, very few men, because we were in a transport of families of the men who had already been arrested. We stopped at stations and were given hot water. Somebody had some beautiful, huge white onions and they tasted wonderful. This was luxury. I didn't realise how tasty onions can be until we went on the train! I don't remember that much from the travelling. You switch off and wait when you are frightened and when bad things happen to you; you just try to survive the best you can.
The final wave of transports left Poland just before war was declared between Germany and Russia in June 1941. Wladyslawa Smenda, who was deported with her 10-year-old son Janusz and 6-year-old daughter Teresa in May 1941, described how they were shut in the cattle wagons for nearly three weeks:

We slept on the bare boards. We were lucky because we had been allowed to pack a few things, so we had coats to lie on. Some people had nothing. There were only tiny windows and once a day they opened the doors and gave us soup and water. I never ate any. I was so numb that the people in the train were afraid I was going mad. They always put me by the window so I could look out. I didn't look out for my children but the other people gave them something to eat. Then, when we were north of Krasnoyarsk, by the Yenisei River, the war between the Germans and Russians started and the train was needed for the army. We were unloaded and put in a field surrounded by soldiers. We were women and children. No men. It was awful but I was better when they put me out from the train. I started to think then.
Also in the last wave of transports from Poland were the Zebrowski family.

We were taken away on the evening of 20th June 1941 and the war broke out on the 22nd. When we were in Minsk, on the Russian side of the border, the last two trucks on our train were bombed so we were very quickly whisked away from there. We didn't stop for a long time. It was very hot. There was a lack of water but my mother had baskets of eggs and we drank those raw eggs to help our thirst. I don't know how long we had been travelling for, but our bread was already mouldy. One night, we stopped at a station and Mother took one loaf of this mouldy bread and threw it from our truck. There was a woman in a beautiful coat and she grabbed it. You should have seen her face. It was covered with that mould but she was eating with such a hunger. My mother cried and said, 'Is that what my children are going to?' She didn't throw any more bread away. (Teresa Sosnowska nèe Zebrowska)
Chapter 3 - Exile in the USSR (continued)
Life in the USSR
The Polish exiles' experiences in the Soviet Union are difficult to encapsulate. All participants in this project had strong recollections of this time in their lives, and each account ranged across a diversity of themes, all pertinent to an understanding of survival. Together, their stories highlight the complex nature of human endurance in the face of extreme physical and psychological hardship.

Polish deportees were sent to a range of geographical locations for varying lengths of time, dependent upon the date of their arrest and deportation. Once in the Soviet Union, their immediate fate was largely determined by the people who controlled the local kolhozes.

Some adults, labelled as wrieditieli or 'undesirables', were left to their own devices, with no opportunity to work for food provisions. Others were forced into a variety of labouring jobs such as tree felling and wood cutting, digging holes, snow clearing, brick making, milking, shovelling grain, and cooking. Access to both accommodation and food varied from kolhoz to kolhoz, as did relations with the Soviet authorities and local inhabitants. Some families were able to establish limited contact with relatives back in Poland and were assisted by periodic parcels of food or money, others had to rely solely on the possessions they had been able to take with them. As many deportees had been given little time to pack, their ability to supplement meagre rations through the sale or exchange of personal possessions varied greatly.



Polish children deported to USSR after 1941
(Courtesy of Tadeusz Dobrostanski)

In some communities children were forced to attend Soviet schools, while in others they were left to their own devices. Occasionally children found paid work to help the survival of their diminished family units, in other families the eldest children aided family survival by undertaking the care of younger siblings, and by 'hunting and foraging' for additional sources of food and fuel.

All Polish exiles had to endure an attack upon their religious and political ideologies. As Roman Catholics forced to live under a communist regime they were subject to various degrees of religious persecution, as well as an enforced acceptance of a communal work ethic which allowed no room for the strong sense of individuality so cherished by Poles.

Perhaps the most effective way to illustrate both the diversity and the common experiences of deportation is to allow participants to speak for themselves. These edited excerpts give some indication of the conditions which had to be survived and the ways in which individuals managed in the face of adversity. For ease, they have been sorted into three sections, the first covering experiences of exile in Siberia, the second detailing experiences in Kazakhstan and the third covering other experiences of deportation. The stories are presented in order of age of the participant at the start of exile.
Life in the USSR
The Polish exiles' experiences in the Soviet Union are difficult to encapsulate. All participants in this project had strong recollections of this time in their lives, and each account ranged across a diversity of themes, all pertinent to an understanding of survival. Together, their stories highlight the complex nature of human endurance in the face of extreme physical and psychological hardship.

Polish deportees were sent to a range of geographical locations for varying lengths of time, dependent upon the date of their arrest and deportation. Once in the Soviet Union, their immediate fate was largely determined by the people who controlled the local kolhozes.

Some adults, labelled as wrieditieli or 'undesirables', were left to their own devices, with no opportunity to work for food provisions. Others were forced into a variety of labouring jobs such as tree felling and wood cutting, digging holes, snow clearing, brick making, milking, shovelling grain, and cooking. Access to both accommodation and food varied from kolhoz to kolhoz, as did relations with the Soviet authorities and local inhabitants. Some families were able to establish limited contact with relatives back in Poland and were assisted by periodic parcels of food or money, others had to rely solely on the possessions they had been able to take with them. As many deportees had been given little time to pack, their ability to supplement meagre rations through the sale or exchange of personal possessions varied greatly.



Polish children deported to USSR after 1941
(Courtesy of Tadeusz Dobrostanski)

In some communities children were forced to attend Soviet schools, while in others they were left to their own devices. Occasionally children found paid work to help the survival of their diminished family units, in other families the eldest children aided family survival by undertaking the care of younger siblings, and by 'hunting and foraging' for additional sources of food and fuel.

All Polish exiles had to endure an attack upon their religious and political ideologies. As Roman Catholics forced to live under a communist regime they were subject to various degrees of religious persecution, as well as an enforced acceptance of a communal work ethic which allowed no room for the strong sense of individuality so cherished by Poles.

Perhaps the most effective way to illustrate both the diversity and the common experiences of deportation is to allow participants to speak for themselves. These edited excerpts give some indication of the conditions which had to be survived and the ways in which individuals managed in the face of adversity. For ease, they have been sorted into three sections, the first covering experiences of exile in Siberia, the second detailing experiences in Kazakhstan and the third covering other experiences of deportation. The stories are presented in order of age of the participant at the start of exile