NKVD in September 1939 – Poland

When the Red Army crossed into eastern Poland in September 1939, a new chapter of suffering began for countless Polish citizens. Families were awakened in the middle of the night by the pounding of NKVD fists on their doors. They were given minutes, sometimes only moments, to gather what they could carry. Then they were forced onto sledges or wagons and taken to train stations, where endless lines of cattle cars stood waiting.

“We had no idea where they were taking us. All we knew was that the journey had no end, and that home was behind us, slipping further away with every turn of the wheels.” — Polish deportee’s memoir.

For weeks, the trains rattled eastward. Each wagon crammed dozens of people, with only a hole in the floor for sanitation. Hunger gnawed at them. Infants wailed without milk. Elderly people died quietly in corners. The stench of unwashed bodies and sickness hung heavy in the freezing air. When the train stopped, corpses were thrown out onto the snow before the living were forced back in and the journey resumed.

Those who survived the ordeal arrived in Siberia, Kazakhstan, or the far reaches of the Soviet Arctic. Their new homes were logging camps, collective farms, or open taiga where they were ordered to build crude barracks with their bare hands. Temperatures plunged to –40°C. Clothing was rags, food a thin soup with bits of cabbage or husk, bread rationed to a few ounces a day.

“The cold was so merciless that the air itself seemed to cut our skin. Our boots were torn, our fingers cracked and bled, and every breath felt like swallowing knives.”

Labor was relentless. Men and women alike were sent to fell trees, dig ditches, or haul timber. Children too young to work scavenged for food or watched siblings while parents collapsed in exhaustion. Disease was constant – typhus, dysentery, scurvy spread easily among the malnourished. The graveyards filled quickly, crosses made of rough wood tilting in the snow.

And yet, in that “inhuman land,” as many survivors called it, people clung to their humanity. They whispered prayers at night, smuggled rosaries, taught the children songs and poems so they would not forget Polish words. They shared crumbs of bread with neighbors, knowing both would remain hungry but refusing to let solidarity die.

“We carried Poland in our hearts. Though the forests tried to bury us, though hunger hollowed us, we survived because we refused to forget who we were.”

In 1941, after Hitler turned on Stalin, a fragile “amnesty” was declared, and many Polish deportees were allowed to leave. Those strong enough made their way south, across thousands of miles, to join General Anders and his army. Some marched all the way to the Middle East, their skeletal figures in tattered clothes standing as a living testimony of survival. Others never left Siberia, their names lost to the frost and silence.

Of the 2,636,000 million Poles deported and exiled to the wastelands of (among other places) the Siberian Tundra, Kazakhstan and the Russian Arctic by the Soviet NKVD between February 1940 and June 1941, only 115,000 (or 4.36%) were officially accounted for.

The story of the Polish Siberian exiles remains one of the least known chapters of the Second World War, a tragedy of uprooted lives, of children who grew up in exile, of families broken and scattered. Yet it is also a story of endurance: that even in the coldest wilderness, the flame of identity, faith, and dignity could not be extinguished.

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