New Zealand Listener – August 24, 2019

28 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019

T

here can be few countries with

a more harrowing wartime his-

tory than Poland, which lost six

million people – one fifth of its

population – between 1939 and

1945.

Its fate was determined in August 1939,

when Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Joseph

Stalin’s Soviet Union signed a pact in

which the two countries secretly agreed to

carve Poland up between them.

Germany invaded nine days later.

Today, tourists take a half-hour boat ride

from Gdansk to Westerplatte, on the

Baltic Sea coast, where they can see the

ruined barracks where a small Polish gar-

rison held out against German attackers

for seven days in what some historians say

was the opening battle of World War II.

On September 17, Soviet tanks rolled

into Poland from the east. Polish army

officers were rounded up

and imprisoned, along with

anyone else – police offic-

ers, intellectuals, priests and

lawyers – considered likely to

cause problems under a com-

munist regime.

In April and May the fol-

lowing year, the prisoners

were executed en masse by

the Soviet secret police, the

NKVD. The number of victims

of the Katyn massacre, named

after the forest where most

of the killings took place, is

estimated at 22,000.

For decades, it was assumed the slaugh-

ter was the work of the German army – a

belief encouraged by the Soviet govern-

ment. It wasn’t until 1990 that the Soviet

Union, as part of the Glasnost (“open-

ness”) reforms promoted by Mikhail

Gorbachev, admitted responsibility.

Another estimated 1.5 million residents

from Soviet-controlled Poland were exiled

to Siberia to provide labour on collective

farms. They endured two years of appall-

ing hardship before being released under

a so-called amnesty, after Hitler turned

against his erst-

while communist

ally and ordered

the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

The Soviet Union was now on the same

side as the Allies and the Polish slave

labourers had become a problem. Besides,

it was in Stalin’s interest for the thousands

of former Polish soldiers in Siberia to be

allowed to join the Allied forces in the war

against Germany.

There followed an epic exodus through

Central Asia to Persia (now Iran) and ulti-

mately to the West. The 732 Polish refugee

children who famously came to New Zea-

land and were settled in Pahiatua in 1944

were among those who had fled Siberia.

Most were orphans whose parents had

died of illness or malnutrition, either in

exile or during their trek to freedom. The

75th anniversary of their arrival will be

celebrated in November this year.

It was assumed the children would

eventually be repatriated to Poland, but at

the Yalta conference in 1945, Britain and

America bowed to Stalin’s demands that

eastern Poland be annexed to the Soviet

Union and the rest of Poland placed under

communist rule.

As one of the Polish refugees would later

write: “Our sustaining dream of a return

to a free Poland was shattered.”

Most ended up staying in New Zea-

land. It would be another 45 years before

Poland finally achieved the freedom the

refugee children yearned for.

The Soviet Union

admitted responsibility

for the Katyn massacre

only 50 years later.

MA

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THE WARSAW UPRISING: 75 YEARS ON

Orphans to betrayal

Massacre and enslavement were

preludes to an exodus that flung

Polish children as far as Pahiatua.

German

investigators

exhume corpses

from the Katyn

massacre.

Prime Minister

Peter Fraser greets

Polish refugee

children, many of

them orphaned

and distressed

(inset).