Don't Sweep Stalin's Mass Deportation of Polish People Under the Rugs of History

There's much brouhaha in today's political climate. Russia continues to generate headlines and America forever seems lost in a swirl of political crises that seem plucked out of an absurd serial befit for a streaming platform. (Sorry Netflix, real life beat you to it. Who would have thought?)

That said, let's not lose sight of recent anniversaries. Back in September of 2019, came the 80th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and Joseph Stalin’s invasion of the country on Sept. 17. Everything changed after that. Declarations of war ensued. Hitler began to take one half of Poland; Stalin helped himself to the other.

The world would never be the same.

A few months ago, on Jan. 27, was the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In touching tributes around the world, survivors and families of survivors shared personal tales of triumph and tragedy, revealing so effectively both the fragility of life as well as its steely resolve. The indomitable human spirit — it will not be shaken.

The year 2020 also marks another noteworthy anniversary—80 years ago, Stalin began his mass deportations of Polish citizens. These events, which I chronicled in my memoir Grace Revealed, created a profound ripple effect on the individuals who lived through them as well as the generation that followed—from PTSD among survivors to inherited family trauma on next-gen offspring. And yet, Stalin's dirty deeds may remain out of the collective queue. As I plan more public speaking engagements this year on this subject, I've compromised five reasons the events that took place 80 years should be brought deeper into the mainstream—and remembered.

5. Stalin’s Mass Deportation of Polish Citizens

Stalin's mass deportations came in four waves: the first beginning on Feb. 10, 1940, another in April, and another in June—and yet another in the summer of 1941. Few Polish families in the rural stretches of eastern Poland (now Ukraine) could have predicted the full extent of Stalin’s wrath. Like a dragon descending over a medieval village, his invasion of Poland turned into a bona fide reign of terror followed by Sovietization. Stalin’s strategy was to occupy the eastern borderlands (today western Ukraine, western Belarus and eastern Lithuania), also referred to as the Kresy, with a population of more than 13 million people including Belarusians, Czechs, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and other citizens. Sovietization had one purpose: to liquidate the entire Polish state. The mass arrests of civil leaders, priests, policemen and judges actually began on Sept. 18, 1939; however, they continued until June 1941. In all, approximately 200,000 Polish POWs were captured by the Soviets. The majority of them were sent to the gulags.

4. Nearly 1 Million Polish People

That is the estimated total tally of deported Polish citizens sent to Siberia. Under the supervision of Lavrentiy Beria, who had become head of Stalin's NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the first of several grand-scale deportations began on Feb. 10, 1940. The Kresy-Siberia Foundation, a wealth of knowledge on this subject, notes that on Feb. 10, more than 100 trains, each carrying an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 Poles, transported nearly 220,000 souls — military veterans, settlers, foresters and farmers — into the glacial abyss of Siberian slave labor. Polish citizens living on rural farmland at the time quickly realized that their "happily-ever-after" has suddenly turned into a fractured fairy tale.

3. Lavrentiy Beria

It’s not a name we often hear or read about, but the NKVD head was perhaps one of Stalin’s most trusted comrades. Beria succeeded Nikolai Yezhov as NKVD head in late 1938; Yezhov met his fate in 1940, when orders were given for his execution. It was common at the time for Stalin and the government to swiftly change course and condemn former officials for circumstances they themselves set in motion. Yezhov was blamed for a number of bad things, the economic ramifications spawned by the Great Purge among them. By Stalin’s rulebook, his execution was par for the course. In the meantime, Beria took the political baton that was handed to him and oversaw the execution of thousands of prisoners. He did more than become part of Stalin’s elite inner circle. He crawled into the strategic bed with the man and produced its sinister offspring: the mass deportations.

2. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Germany’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop crafted and signed this accord, which became the official Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union. Also known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the documents were signed in Moscow long before Feb. 10, 1940 — on Aug. 23, 1939, in fact. But the action spawned sinister results later. The agreement allowed Hitler to invade Poland at will. But only one week later the Soviets rampaged areas in the Far East in the Battles of Khalkhin Gol (or the Nomonhan Incident), which saw the fall of the Japanese Sixth Army. By December 1939 the Soviets had already begun making arrangements for the deportations. On Feb. 5, 1940, the empty boxcars had been lined up. It was just a matter of time.

1. History Repeats Itself?

Well ... it’s hard to dismiss some of the more noticeable atrocities during the last 60 years. Pick one, any one. Vietnam. North and South Korea. The Middle East. News of Russian interference in American elections. What remains clear to me, after interviewing many survivors of the Polish deportations, is that the stories of the Polish citizens need to be shared and told. Their histories need to be preserved. One thing that sprang so marvelously from what unfolded with the Jewish community in the wake of Nazism is that the stories were told. The experiences were shared. The world heard. In many ways, some would say, Poland and its people did not have as much levity in the 1940s and 1950s. After WWII, the country had been taken over. Communism ruled. Stalin was both King-Baby and Dysfunctional Daddy in the East. Only now are we beginning to see more stories of the deported citizens in documentaries and books. One Polish survivor I interviewed in Chicago, who was in her seventies at the time, told me, “I never had a chance to heal from this. We were never able to talk about it.” Now she can. We we can.

Learn more about what befell the Poles after the deportations here.

Watch my uncle, John Migut, recount his experiences of the deportations here.