•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
• • •
Additional illustrations
to Part III and captions
may be viewed in
Photo Album III
• • •
|
|
|
Part III
Such was the lot of the deportees until the invasion
of the Soviet Union by Germany on June 22, 1941 and the signing of the
Polish-Soviet (Sikorski-Maisky) agreement of July 30, 1941 which, among
other things, provided for the release of all Polish citizens in Soviet
exile as well as for the formation of a Polish army on Soviet soil.
The document, signed in the presence of Winston Churchill
and Anthony Eden, used the unfortunate term "amnesty" (the word should
have been "manumission" or "emancipation") to characterize the release
of the exiles, who became Stalin's bargaining chip in the contest for
the status quo ante borders of Poland. According to a January
15, 1942, note from Beria to Stalin, 389 041 Polish citizens were freed
as a result of that "amnesty". These included 200 828 ethnic Poles, 90
662 Jews, 31 392 Ukrainians, 27 418 Belorussians, 3421 Russians, and
2291 persons of other nationalities. There was no need to inform Stalin
of the fact that the Soviet authorities often impeded the release of
the deportees from their various places of confinement and absolved
themselves from assisting them in any way whatsoever upon their release.
This utter lack of concern brought about a crisis of unimaginable proportions.
Elated by this turn of events, the far-flung Polish exiles
began to make, as best as they could, their way southward, to where
Gen. Anders' army was forming, in the hope of liberation. These journeys,
often several weeks long, brought new suffering - tens of thousands
died from hunger, cold, heat, disease and exhaustion on that trip to
freedom. For many, the help provided by the United States and Great
Britain was too little and too late. In the Samarkand district alone,
in a two-and-a-half-month period in 1942, out of 27 000, 1632 Polish
citizens perished from typhus and malnutrition. The Polish embassy estimated
that between December 1941 and June 1942, 10 percent of the 200 000
Polish citizens that gathered in the central Soviet republics died of
typhus alone.
Meanwhile, by June 1942, the Polish authorities had gathered
over 77 000 lost children and orphans and with the help offered by Great
Britain, Canada and the American Red Cross planned to evacuate about
50 000 of them. But Moscow would not agree to such a massive evacuation
of children citing transportation problems as the reason and denying
that the Polish children were in any danger. The words of reassurance
offered by Deputy Commissar Andrei Vyshinsky to Polish Ambassador Stanislaw
Kot must surely rank among the most cynical ever uttered by a Soviet
official. "The welfare of the children", he said, "is assured
by the Soviet authorities". In reality, the Soviets were afraid that
the evacuation of these children and the disclosure of their condition,
at times indistinguishable from that of Nazi concentration-camp victims,
would have earned them condemnation of the civilized world.
As the negotiations, or rather pleas, for the children's
release continued, on January 16, 1943, when there were still hundreds
of thousands of Polish citizens in the USSR, the Polish embassy was
informed that since the number of Poles in the Soviet Union had become
negligible, there was no longer a need for the Polish social welfare
agencies on Soviet soil - four hundred of them, including numerous orphanages
and hospitals, were immediately closed or taken over, along with all
their internationally-donated supplies, by Soviet authorities. That
March, the remaining Polish citizens were forced to accept Soviet citizenship.
So much for "amnesty", the Soviet version.
On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced to the world
their discovery of the mass graves at Katyn. On April 25 of that same
year Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government
using the Polish protests over the executions at Katyn as a pretext.
Nevertheless, during the two great evacuations (the
first, between March 24 and the beginning of April 1942; the second,
between August 10 and September 1, 1942), from Krasnovodsk across the
Caspian Sea to Pahlavi, and the smaller overland evacuations from Ashkhabad
to Mashhad (March and September 1942), about 115 000 Polish citizens
(including some 37 000 civilians, of whom about 18 300 were children)
left the Soviet Union. The soldiers of Gen. Anders' army went on to
fight in many battles, including the one at Monte Cassino; the civilians,
because they could not be repatriated, were forced to remain in foreign
lands for the remainder of the war.
The first stop of the refugees evacuated with Anders'
army was Iran, where they found temporary quarters in large transit
camps initially located in Pahlavi and Mashhad, later in Teheran and
Ahvaz. While Gen. Anders' troops were subsequently transferred to Palestine
and from there to Iraq, the civilians remained in Iran. To accommodate
the refugees, a sprawling stationary camp was established in Isfahan.
Because it housed several sub-camps for the thousands of orphaned Polish
children, Isfahan came to be known as the "City of Polish Children".
The relief assistance afforded by Polish, British, American, and Iranian
authorities improved their living conditions and brought the devastating
contagious diseases under control - diseases, acquired in the Soviet
Union, which continued to rob the refugees of their lives even after
liberation (over 2000 refugees died in Iran alone). In time, various
Polish institutions, including 24 schools serving some 3000 students,
were established in Iran and several Polish periodicals and newspapers
appeared.
Their stay in Iran, however, was cut short because of
the hostility of the Soviets occupying Northern Iran and because of
the threat of the German armies which had already reached the Caucasus.
Eventually, the refugees were transferred from Iran to other countries,
such as Lebanon, Palestine, India, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, North
and South Rhodesia, South Africa, Mexico and New Zealand. Wherever they
went, the Polish refugees encountered effusive good will, not only on
the part of the respective governments that invited them, but also on
the part of the native populations. Welcoming signs with Polish flags,
white eagles, and words of encouragement often greeted their arrival,
high government officials paid them visits, and even commemorative
monuments were erected in their honour! Unlike the Soviet Union, these
were, after all, ancient civilized cultures.
Why America did not open its doors, and open them wide,
to the Polish refugees? That the Western Allies knew all about the
deportations is clear from their relief efforts in their behalf in the
Soviet Union and the Middle East. In Iran, although debriefed, the
refugees were not encouraged to speak about their experiences in the
Soviet Union with outsiders. In America, the date (June 25, 1943) of
the arrival aboard the USS Hermitage of the first transport
consisting of 706 refugees, including 166 children, was a State secret
and two days after disembarking the Poles were sent across the border
to Mexico. The second group, 726 refugees including 408 children,
mostly orphans, ended up in Mexico as well. The delicate balance
between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies had to be maintained,
it seems, at any cost.
Among the victims on this altar of silence were the 14
500 prisoners of war interned in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov,
and executed in cold blood in Katyn, Kharkov and Kalinin in April and
May 1940. The Allies never officially contradicted the Soviet line that
the Germans, who dug up the graves in the Katyn forest, were responsible
for the murders.
No doubt "Uncle Joe", homo sovieticus barbarosus incarnate, must have been grateful to the Western Allies for their conspiracy
of silence, for preserving the "good name" of his evil empire. He was
even more grateful at Yalta, when the Western Allies granted him the
right to enslave all of Eastern and half of Central Europe.
But, was there ever a real need for this cover-up, this
concern for maintaining the "delicate balance", this appeasement of
Stalin after the revocation of the "amnesty" and the April 25, 1943 rupture
of diplomatic relations with the Polish government? He was committed
to fighting the Germans whether he wanted to or not and he needed the
help of the West. It was also abundantly clear that he would not allow
any more evacuations out of the Soviet Union. Moreover - a full, timely
and well-orchestrated disclosure of the Soviet atrocities in Eastern
Poland, the deportations, and Katyn - in effect a Soviet moral equivalent
of the Nuremberg Trial - may have had a significant impact on the events
at Yalta which, in turn, would have had a profound effect on the immediate
postwar forced repatriation of Soviet citizens (often executed upon
their return to the Soviet Union because they were considered to be
"tainted"), as well as the displaced persons of other nations - there
were hundreds of thousands in both categories. More important, it may
have given the Allies that much-needed edge to withstand Stalin's postwar
territorial demands and thereby would have also prevented the additional
Soviet postwar atrocities in those countries which, as the result of
Yalta, became captive nations behind the Iron Curtain.
Appeasement, as it is known, only emboldens the aggressor.
The revelations of the Soviet war crimes, crimes against peace, and
crimes against humanity, when they finally came out in the Western media
during the Cold War period, were like crying over spilled milk.
*
All the camps and settlements established in Iran, Lebanon,
Palestine, India, Africa and Mexico (New Zealand offered from the beginning
permanent residency to the orphaned children) were meant to be temporary
quarters for the Polish refugees until the end of the war and the expected
liberation of their country. Although a few did return to join their
families in Poland, after Yalta and the significant changes in Poland's
borders, for the majority of the refugees the return became an impossible
dream.
What became of the rest? Many of those who wound up in
New Zealand and the Union of South Africa remained where they were brought.
The Polish refugees housed in the various camps in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine,
India and Africa moved to Great Britain and its dominions - Canada and
Australia, from where some of them later emigrated to the United States;
some also settled in Argentina and other countries in South America.
Thus ended the saga of the deportees from Eastern Poland
who managed to get out of the Soviet Union under the provisions of the
tenuous "amnesty" of 1941. But what happened to the hundreds of thousands
of deportees who did not leave with Gen. Anders' army? For several hundreds
of thousands the Soviet Union became their final resting place before
the war's end. Another quarter of a million were repatriated to the
so called Recovered Territories of Western Poland during the massive
population exchanges following World War II. As to what happened to
those who never got out of the Soviet Russia - God only knows. Some,
no doubt, are still there.
|
