Historical silence becomes a second death

Edward Reid

I write about Polish history not to compare tragedies or measure one nation’s suffering against another, but because silence becomes a second death. When a nation loses six million of its citizens, when entire villages disappear from the landscape, when children, teachers, clergy, professors, resistance fighters, and ordinary families are buried together in rubble, forests, prison basements, and unmarked fields, the least we can do is ensure that their stories do not fade into the background of someone else’s narrative.

Silence erases people. Memory restores them.

Under German occupation, Poland experienced one of the most brutal and comprehensive systems of terror in all of Europe. The Germans murdered more than three million Polish citizens and three million Polish Jews, a combined destruction that wiped out almost a quarter of the entire prewar population. Yet even that unimaginable number does not tell the full story, because it does not include the enormous number of Poles who fell victim to Soviet repression before, during, and after the war.

When Germany and the Soviet Union secretly divided Poland through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, two totalitarian powers set in motion a coordinated plan to destroy the Polish nation as a living, functioning society. While the Germans targeted Polish elites, youth, clergy, resistance leaders, and entire communities in extermination actions and mass executions, the Soviets carried out their own parallel assault on Polish identity. The NKVD arrested, deported, and executed tens of thousands of Polish citizens, and sent more than a million others to the harshest corners of Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Arctic Gulag system. Many died in freezing barracks, starvation camps, and slave labor sites where even children were forced to work.

Most people know the name Katyn, where the Soviets executed twenty-two thousand Polish officers, policemen, scholars, doctors, engineers, and community leaders. Far fewer realize that Katyn was only one chapter in a much wider crime that spanned dozens of execution sites and countless labor camps, and that the Soviet campaign against Poles continued long after 1945.

When the Red Army occupied Polish lands as supposed liberators, many Home Army veterans and underground leaders were arrested, tortured, deported, and executed. Priests, professors, teachers, and local officials who had survived the German occupation were suddenly targeted again, this time by the Soviet-backed security services. Poland went from one occupation to another, and the transition brought little relief.

Few people today understand that Poland lost a higher percentage of its population than any other Allied nation. Yet despite this, Polish suffering rarely appears in Western memory as a central part of the war’s story. In many textbooks and films, Poles appear almost as background characters, overshadowed by the narratives of larger powers. The truth, however, is clear. Poles were not secondary victims. They were one of the primary targets of two totalitarian regimes that both sought to destroy their national existence.

Take the Warsaw Uprising as one example. Between August and October 1944, the Germans murdered up to two hundred thousand Polish civilians, an atrocity that included mass shootings of families in courtyards, the burning alive of hospital patients, the rape and killing of women and children, and the destruction of entire neighborhoods. The Wola massacre alone claimed tens of thousands of lives in a matter of days. After the killing, German forces set about systematically destroying Warsaw itself, blowing up churches, libraries, museums, universities, and residential blocks with the intention of erasing the city entirely. All of this took place while the Soviet Army watched from across the river and allowed the uprising to be crushed, knowing that the annihilation of the Polish resistance would make postwar control of the country far easier.

Consider also the concentration camps. Poles were among the largest prisoner groups in several German camps, including Mauthausen, where approximately forty-seven thousand Polish prisoners were held, a number larger than any other national group. Many were worked to death in quarries, beaten by guards, shot without warning, or murdered in sadistic displays of cruelty that made survival nearly impossible.

And then, when the war finally ended, the accounting for these crimes was shockingly incomplete. Tens of thousands of German perpetrators, including men who murdered families, carried out mass executions, burned villages, and tortured prisoners, never faced any form of justice. Many lived as respected citizens in postwar West Germany, with successful careers and comfortable retirements. At the same time, Soviet perpetrators were never held accountable at all. NKVD officers who sent Polish families to Siberia or oversaw interrogations and torture sessions received medals, promotions, and state honors. In both German and Soviet spheres, many of those responsible for the suffering of Poles died peacefully in their beds, while their victims were left in silence.

This is why I write. It is not to diminish or overshadow anyone else’s suffering, because the German occupation and the Holocaust represent a vast, shared human catastrophe that engulfed many nations and peoples. It is instead to restore accuracy, dignity, and balance to a story that political convenience, Cold War alliances, and historical simplifications have obscured for decades. Polish victims deserve more than a line in a textbook or a passing reference in someone else’s tragedy. They deserve to be remembered fully and truthfully, as human beings whose lives mattered and whose suffering shaped the fate of an entire nation.

The stories of these people have waited a long time to be told, and the least we can do is tell them clearly, honestly, and without fear.

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