Dear Eve,
Thank you the report on the Pope's visit to Kazakhstan. There are
many Poles there whom the Polish government is trying to repatriate.
My mother sent money and supplies for Polish schools in Kazakhstan
and received letters written in old-fashioned Polish intermingled
with Russianisms and local languages.
The date 1936 is probably not a typo. Many Poles found themselves
trapped in the USSR even as Poland was reborn after WWI.
From the chapter Poland, the Enemy Nation in "The Black Book of
Communism":
"By 1924 the repatration of Poles under the Treaty of Riga was coming
to an end, although there were still between 1.1 and 1.2 million in
the USSR. The vast majority of these lived in either Ukraine and
Belorussia." p.364
"The Poles, regardless of whether they were Soviet citizens, suffered
every aspect of Stalinist terror: the hunt for spies, dekulakization,
anticlericalism, national and ethnic "cleansing," the Great Purge,
the purges of border regions and of the Red Army itself,
"pacification" operations to help the Polish communists into power,
and all the forms that terror took, including forced labor, the
execution of prisoners of war, and mass deportations of groups of
people labeled as "socially dangerous elements." p364
"In Ukraine, Polish resistance [to collectivization] was fierce and
had to be broken by force. According to figures at the time, the
population of the regions inhabited by Poles fell by around 25% in
1933 alone." p365
"In the summer of 1937, the NKVD embarked on new repressions against
national minorities, beginning with the Germans and moving on to the
Poles." p366
"According to an NKVD report of 10 July 1938, the number of prisoners
of Polish origin was 134,519, 53% of whom came from Ukraine or
Belorussia. Between 40 and 50 percent (between 54,000 and 67,000)
were shot. The survivors were sent to camps or deported to
Kazakhstan. The Poles account for some 10% of the total number of
victims of the Great Purge and for around 40% of the victims of
purges against national minorities. These figures are, if anything
understated, since thousands of Poles were deported from Ukraine and
Belorussia for reasons unconnected with the "Polish Operation." p367
And Soviet deportations of Poles to Kazakhstan and the Gulag
continued AFTER the end of World War Two. But that is another chapter.
Chris Gladun, Toronto
