• Portions of Poland were one of the few German occupied territories in Europe where helping a Jew was punishable by death; often entire families were executed for the crime. It took phenomenal courage for a Pole to reach out to a Jew under these circumstances and many did.

• The Soviets invaded Eastern Poland on September 17, 1939, dividing the country into two halves in a deal with the German Reich, and promptly began deporting citizens to Siberia, beginning with prisoners of war.

• According to documents signed by Stalin and his senior staff and revealed to the world by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviets condemned to death some 22,000 captured Polish officers, militia and police for the crime of being dangerous to the Soviet State. Many of these men (and women) were murdered in and around the forests of Katyn in early 1940.The mass graves were later discovered by the Germans, but the British and American governments by then allied with the Soviets, ignored the massacre. The largest grave contained 800 bodies. Grave sites of mass murders ( not just of Poles) continue to be uncovered.

• Deported Poles in Siberia and those languishing in Soviet jails were officially freed by the Soviet dictator shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. However, due to the great need for slave labour, many camp commandants were reluctant to let their Polish prisoners go and did everything they could to stop them. Of those who could get away, many of them (men, women and children including many orphans) headed south to escape the Soviets and join the Polish Army being formed on Soviet soil. This army would later become known as the Polish Second Corps which fought under the operational command of the British 8th Army in Italy. Many of those who could not get away in time, joined (or were forced into) the Soviet army and fought in Polish units against the Germans on the eastern front.

• Polish soldiers, citizens and refugees were devastated when the British and American leaders handed over post war control of Poland to Stalin, the Soviet dictator who had invaded their country. He assembled a puppet government from amongst Polish communists while the true Polish Government-in-Exile in London was excluded despite that fact that it had stood by Britain from the start of the war.

• The Polish Armed Forces in the West remained poised and ready to boot the Soviets out of Poland as late as 1945. However the British government, tired of war and anxious not to upset Stalin, demobilized them instead. Even worse, following protests by Stalin, they did not allow these allied soldiers to participate in London’s Victory parade.

The Re-invasion of Poland by Soviet Forces in 1944-45

Standard history texts and articles continually refer to the “liberation” of Poland by the Soviet Red Army towards the end of World War Two. There was no true liberation but merely the replacement of one brutal regime by another. The Soviets literally occupied post-war Poland, with the aid of Polish troops and Communist puppets installed by and loyal to Stalin, until the late 1980s.

A quote from Neal Ascherson’s book, The Polish August, summarizes this fact: “The Stalinist epoch in Poland was at once sinister and grotesque, a period in which the party ruled through open police terror… Poland was opened to almost uncontrolled Soviet economic exploitation, through one-sided terms of trade, while the bureaucracy was in some areas thoroughly penetrated by Soviet advisers. All this was accompanied by deafening propaganda devoted to imaginary successes and to equally imaginary espionage or subversion plots against the regime.”

The Polish August, Neal Ascherson, Penguin Books, 1981

We ask all Survivors and their children to consider their heritage to be worth saving for posterity. We ask that they contact us to arrange to have their historical documents or artifacts donated to a major archive (if they are not to be passed on to the next generation).

Despite our focus on the survivors of Siberia (Sybiraks), we are also trying to account for all Poles who perished during the war.