I found a source telling 2nd Polish Corps in Italy 1944-45 employed women in logistic roles as truck drivers, etc.... I wonder: where did those gals came from? They were in original Polish army of 1939 as the large part of polish soldiers or whatever else?
thanks
Lupo
Polish women
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Lupo Solitario
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Ogorek
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In 1939-40 almost 2,000,000 Polish citizens were deported to the Gulags by the Soviets. After the Germans turned on their "Allie" there was a general amnesty declared for the Poles, and a Polish army was formed in the USSR. Sizable numbers were evacuated to Iran for a number of different reasons, before the Soviets no longer permitted evacuation. These included women and children.
Many of the women and children were sent on to refugee camps around the world, including Uganda, India, and even Mexico. Those that stayed in the Middle East became part of the Armed Forces. The children were placed in schools that also had a military curriculum in addition to basic education, as it seemed that the war might go on forever, and it was anticipated that they would eventually be needed for the ranks.
Woman did many auxiliary jobs in the II Corps, administrative, intelligence, canteens, supply, and education for the young soldiers who had none in the Gulags. They eventually followed the II Corps to Italy, where there were several transportation companies composed of women.
Many of the women and children were sent on to refugee camps around the world, including Uganda, India, and even Mexico. Those that stayed in the Middle East became part of the Armed Forces. The children were placed in schools that also had a military curriculum in addition to basic education, as it seemed that the war might go on forever, and it was anticipated that they would eventually be needed for the ranks.
Woman did many auxiliary jobs in the II Corps, administrative, intelligence, canteens, supply, and education for the young soldiers who had none in the Gulags. They eventually followed the II Corps to Italy, where there were several transportation companies composed of women.
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PolAntek
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A bit late for this reply (new to forum) - but if you still care, some info may be obtained at this website: http://www.aforgottenodyssey.com/links.html
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Annelie
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Ogorek
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There is a message board for survivors and their families at :
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Kresy-Sib ... ssage/2951
Below is an article about the " "Odyssey" that I had posted previously under a Monte Cassino thread - it is worth re-reading for those interested in the subject
++++++++++
Story Headline: Little left of WWII's Polish history in Iran
Story SubHead: Forgotten journey of death, courage
Story Byline:
By Anwar Faruqi
Associated Press writer
Body Text:
TEHRAN, IRAN -- From time to time, the lone caretaker at the dreary cemetery gets a letter from abroad asking him to light a candle at one of the hundreds of identical headstones at the far end of the walled, unmarked graveyard.
A forgotten chapter of World War II is buried in this Roman Catholic cemetery in a poor neighborhood of Tehran. The occasional candles are the only flickers of remembrance for these 1,892 Polish men, women and children far from home -- and for the calamity that befell them.
In September 1939, Hitler and Stalin pounced on Poland, dismembering it in one of the bleakest chapters in Polish history. Stalin had tens of thousands of Poles carted off to his prison camps, but when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin freed the Poles and agreed they could join a Polish army being formed by the Allies.
That force was to assemble in Persia, the old name of modern-day Iran, which was then under British influence. In a matter of weeks, floods of starving, haggard Poles began trudging toward Iran, most to volunteer for the new army, but many among them were women and children who had no place else to go. In all, between 114,000 and 300,000 Poles are thought to have made it to Iran.
Few are left now
Most eventually moved on to other parts of the world. Some stayed on in Iran, where only about a dozen are still alive. Among them is Helena Stelmach, 69, who lives with her Iranian husband. They have two sons in their early 30s. Anna Borkowska, 83 and probably the oldest of the survivors in Iran, also married an Iranian, a police officer, and had a son. Her husband died in 1968, and their son died in 1982 at age 26. Her mother died several years later. Despite the decades that have passed since they were cast up on Iran's shores, both women fit reluctantly into their present lives.
They speak the language of their childhood; Persian is uttered with thick accents and frequent pauses to search for words. Both took the last names of their Iranian husbands but prefer their Polish ones.
When Borkowska sits at a cheap piano in the living room to help relieve the loneliness, the words of Polish songs stir her modest home. On the stairs outside Stelmach's flat, a pile of Polish magazines waits to be thrown out.
Both homes display photos of Iran's late Islamic leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, alongside pictures of Pope John Paul II and portraits of Jesus and Mary.
Freedom at a cost
A world at war had forgotten the tens of thousands of sick, starving Poles enslaved in Stalin's forced labor camps. In the summer of 1941, startling news began circulating among the inmates: Hitler had invaded Russia.
At a hellish prison in the thick Basharova forest of Arkhangelsk, the Russian commandant had told the arriving prisoners that they would remain there forever, Anna Borkowska recalls. But now, the Soviet Union was in danger.
On a grim day like any other, as they toiled in the forest felling firs and dragging them to the river, the commandant summoned the prisoners for a stunning announcement: They were free.
Two years earlier, weeks before Borkowska's 23rd birthday, her life had been shattered by war and exile. She was in love with Jan, a fellow university student she hoped to marry. She never learned what became of him and never again walked the streets outside her Warsaw home, where they had strolled hand in hand, Anna humming a new song she had learned on the piano, autumn leaves crackling under their feet.
Stalin began emptying Poland of anyone who could resist the occupation. First went military officers and their families, then the intelligentsia, and last, anyone with wealth, influence or education. Borkowska's father was a shipyard executive, and his two children, Anna and Victor, had both finished college. When the door-to-door arrests began, the family escaped to the home of a poor relative in the countryside, where Anna's father died. One midnight, weeks later, the rest of the family was picked up by the Russian secret police, herded into locked freight trains with thousands of other deportees and banished to Siberia.
There, only the strongest survived. Borkowska's brother, two years younger, was not among them. He caught pneumonia and died alone in a hospital a year before they were all set free. "When we buried him, he had a pained expression on his face," Borkowska says. "It was because he died alone, without anyone around who cared," she adds, clutching the favorite remembrance of her brother, a childhood photograph showing the boyish Victor with an oversized violin under his chin.
With the deadly Siberian winter approaching, and afraid that orders for their release could be revoked, swarms of exiles from all corners of Russia, Siberia, Vorkuta, the Ural Mountains, Kolyma, Novosibirsk and Kazakstan began dragging themselves toward Persia. They abandoned hard labor camps, prisons, forests, mines -- anywhere Stalin had needed slaves.
This time when they loaded into railway cars, there was no despair, but hunger, disease and death traveled with them. Rape, murder and theft were other perils of the road, especially for women or children traveling alone. On a cold day as winter approached, 10-year-old Helena Stelmach and her mother huddled off a train in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan. They joined forces with a young widow and her child in search of food and shelter. An old man in a shabby coffeehouse fed the ragged travelers and gave them shelter at a vacant house. But his was not an act of kindness. He returned that night and tried to attack the women, who fled into the icy darkness, dragging their children behind. A kinder man gave them a place to sleep in peace by the warmth of a furnace at his bakery.
The boats and small ships that ferried the Poles across the Caspian Sea on the last leg of their journey were vessels of hope. But greatly overloaded and without clean drinking water or sanitation, for some they became the bearers of death. The murky sea bottom was the graveyard for those who began to drop from typhoid and other diseases.
Many of the dying were children. Stelmach, whose father had been off fighting the Germans when mother and daughter were deported to Siberia, survived the voyage through a stroke of luck. "The ship's captain had a son suffering from hemophilia.
Mother knew nursing, and she offered to care for the boy in return for a place in the cabin and good food and water," Stelmach recalls. "All around us on the boats, people were
dropping like flies." Finally, on a bitterly cold morning, the refugees began going ashore at the Iranian port of Anzali -- broken, sick, hungry and infested with lice.
Continuing death
There was fresh snow on the ground the morning Gholam Abdol-Rahimi, a struggling photographer in Anzali, emerged from bed to witness ships disgorging disheveled refugees. "They were in bad shape, thin, ill and in rags," Abdol-Rahimi said in the "Lost Requiem," a film made in 1983 by the Iranian director Khosrow Sinai. "A friend of mine, a carpenter, used to make boxes (coffins) for them. About 50 were dying every day." Abdol-Rahimi's photographs are perhaps the most complete account of the catastrophe. But his work was never recognized or published. He died last year at age 83, recalling until the end, his friends say, the morning he woke to find the refugee ships in port.
In all, 2,806 refugees died within a few months of arriving and were buried in cemeteries throughout Iran. Their alien names and the dates on their tombstones chronicle a calamity, even to a visitor without knowledge of their history. Etched on row after row of identical tombstones is a single year of death: 1942. The majority of the arrivals -- men, women and children as young as 14 -- signed up for the new Polish army led by Gen. Wladyslaw Anders, which compiled a distinguished combat record fighting alongside the British, Americans and other Allies. For the rest, new lives began with a bus journey to refugee camps in Tehran, Isfahan and several other cities.
"The friendly Persian people crowded round the buses, shouting what must have been words of welcome, and pushed gifts of dates, nuts, roasted peas with raisins and juicy pomegranates through the open windows," wrote Krystyna Skwarko, a schoolteacher who came with her own two sick children to take charge of a growing orphanage in Isfahan. Skwarko's book, "The Invited," recounts the journey from Anzali, then through Persia and on to New Zealand, where she and 700 orphans eventually were resettled. She died in 1995.
More than 13,000 of the arrivals were children, many of them orphans whose parents had died on the way. In Russia, starving mothers had pushed their children onto passing trains to Iran in hopes of saving them.
Skwarko's impossible task was to heal the scars of war from children who had been robbed of their childhood. "I can never erase from memory the sight of an emaciated 14-year-old girl, standing apart from a newly arrived group, holding a tiny sister tightly in her arms, the smaller so thin that the skin of her arms and legs hung loosely, as on an old man," Skwarko wrote. "The older girl, Irenka Wozniak, whispered as I went up to her: 'I could manage to save only little Ewunia.' "
But amid the heart-rending tales, there are happier accounts of parents who were reunited with their children. Jewish orphans were cared for by a Jewish organization in Iran and later sent to Israel. Others went on to new lives in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and elsewhere.
Only shadows remain
Few residents of Ahvaz in southwestern Iran remember how the downtown neighborhood known as Campulu got its name. It was once "Camp Polonia," one of several camps built for the refugees in cities throughout Iran. Like Campulu, most signs of the Polish journey have faded. Boarding houses, hospitals, schools and orphanages built with Allied funds were used by the refugees for two years, but nothing remains to indicate their past. The laughter, music and cigarette smoke of the Polonia bar and restaurant in downtown Tehran, where Allied servicemen mingled with Polish girls, is a distant memory, like the bright neon "Polonia" sign that once beckoned clients. The basement bar became a chocolate factory and then the print shop it is today.
Behind the British Embassy, not far from the old Polonia, Polish prostitutes once attracted clients with their bright red headscarves, according to filmmaker Sinai. Shaved heads for the treatment of typhus were common among the refugees; the prostitutes adopted the scarves to advertise their trade. Photographs of the time show smartly dressed Polish women in long skirts working as office secretaries, peering through microscopes in laboratories or working as nurses. "Polish maids were sought by well-to-do Iranian ladies who wanted to learn makeup and Western fashions from their servants, who often had better backgrounds and education than the employers themselves," said Sinai, who was born the year before the influx. Many nights, Polish musicians organized soirees to raise money for fellow refugees. Theater and dance entertained those who could afford it. Even the poorest could revel in forgotten pleasures, such as clean beds, warmth, plentiful food and enough room to stretch their legs at night.
Sinai's "Lost Requiem" captures some of the spirit of those times. But like its name, the film is lost, never promoted and today thought to be collecting dust somewhere in the vaults of Iran's state television.
Lingering letters
Occasionally, letters arrive from abroad at the Polish Embassy in Tehran, inquiring about a dead parent or other kin buried in one of the graveyards. The embassy sends back photographs of the cemetery and grave. The letters to the embassy, or to the cemetery itself, come from Britain, New Zealand, the United States, wherever the Polish refugees who passed through Iran have settled. Last year, a woman who had passed through Iran as a child came to visit her mother's grave. The few Polish survivors still living in Iran are not close. They would rather forget the tragedy that binds them. Occasionally, they get together for Christmas at the embassy or at rare reunions. Once they are gone, the grim cemeteries will remain the only footprints through Iran of the Poles' sad, forgotten journey.
Caption: AP PHOTOS
Anna Borkowska holds a family portrait at her home in Tehran, Iran. At 83, Borkowska is probably the oldest of about a dozen Polish survivors still living in Iran. She arrived there during World War II as a Polish refugee. Her brother Victor, right in the portrait, died in a forced-labor camp in Siberia, and her father, center in the portrait, died shortly before the family was deported during Stalin's invasion.
AP PHOTO
Polish orphans often were cared for in hostels, such as this one
in Isfahan, Iran, during World War II. As many as 300,000 Polish
exiles are thought to have arrived in Iran during the war after
being released from hard-labor camps in Siberia. More than 13,000
of the refugees were children, many of them orphans whose parents
had died on the way. In Russia, starving mothers had pushed their
children onto passing trains to Iran in hopes of saving them.
Date Text: Sunday, October 8, 2000
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Kresy-Sib ... ssage/2951
Below is an article about the " "Odyssey" that I had posted previously under a Monte Cassino thread - it is worth re-reading for those interested in the subject
++++++++++
Story Headline: Little left of WWII's Polish history in Iran
Story SubHead: Forgotten journey of death, courage
Story Byline:
By Anwar Faruqi
Associated Press writer
Body Text:
TEHRAN, IRAN -- From time to time, the lone caretaker at the dreary cemetery gets a letter from abroad asking him to light a candle at one of the hundreds of identical headstones at the far end of the walled, unmarked graveyard.
A forgotten chapter of World War II is buried in this Roman Catholic cemetery in a poor neighborhood of Tehran. The occasional candles are the only flickers of remembrance for these 1,892 Polish men, women and children far from home -- and for the calamity that befell them.
In September 1939, Hitler and Stalin pounced on Poland, dismembering it in one of the bleakest chapters in Polish history. Stalin had tens of thousands of Poles carted off to his prison camps, but when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin freed the Poles and agreed they could join a Polish army being formed by the Allies.
That force was to assemble in Persia, the old name of modern-day Iran, which was then under British influence. In a matter of weeks, floods of starving, haggard Poles began trudging toward Iran, most to volunteer for the new army, but many among them were women and children who had no place else to go. In all, between 114,000 and 300,000 Poles are thought to have made it to Iran.
Few are left now
Most eventually moved on to other parts of the world. Some stayed on in Iran, where only about a dozen are still alive. Among them is Helena Stelmach, 69, who lives with her Iranian husband. They have two sons in their early 30s. Anna Borkowska, 83 and probably the oldest of the survivors in Iran, also married an Iranian, a police officer, and had a son. Her husband died in 1968, and their son died in 1982 at age 26. Her mother died several years later. Despite the decades that have passed since they were cast up on Iran's shores, both women fit reluctantly into their present lives.
They speak the language of their childhood; Persian is uttered with thick accents and frequent pauses to search for words. Both took the last names of their Iranian husbands but prefer their Polish ones.
When Borkowska sits at a cheap piano in the living room to help relieve the loneliness, the words of Polish songs stir her modest home. On the stairs outside Stelmach's flat, a pile of Polish magazines waits to be thrown out.
Both homes display photos of Iran's late Islamic leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, alongside pictures of Pope John Paul II and portraits of Jesus and Mary.
Freedom at a cost
A world at war had forgotten the tens of thousands of sick, starving Poles enslaved in Stalin's forced labor camps. In the summer of 1941, startling news began circulating among the inmates: Hitler had invaded Russia.
At a hellish prison in the thick Basharova forest of Arkhangelsk, the Russian commandant had told the arriving prisoners that they would remain there forever, Anna Borkowska recalls. But now, the Soviet Union was in danger.
On a grim day like any other, as they toiled in the forest felling firs and dragging them to the river, the commandant summoned the prisoners for a stunning announcement: They were free.
Two years earlier, weeks before Borkowska's 23rd birthday, her life had been shattered by war and exile. She was in love with Jan, a fellow university student she hoped to marry. She never learned what became of him and never again walked the streets outside her Warsaw home, where they had strolled hand in hand, Anna humming a new song she had learned on the piano, autumn leaves crackling under their feet.
Stalin began emptying Poland of anyone who could resist the occupation. First went military officers and their families, then the intelligentsia, and last, anyone with wealth, influence or education. Borkowska's father was a shipyard executive, and his two children, Anna and Victor, had both finished college. When the door-to-door arrests began, the family escaped to the home of a poor relative in the countryside, where Anna's father died. One midnight, weeks later, the rest of the family was picked up by the Russian secret police, herded into locked freight trains with thousands of other deportees and banished to Siberia.
There, only the strongest survived. Borkowska's brother, two years younger, was not among them. He caught pneumonia and died alone in a hospital a year before they were all set free. "When we buried him, he had a pained expression on his face," Borkowska says. "It was because he died alone, without anyone around who cared," she adds, clutching the favorite remembrance of her brother, a childhood photograph showing the boyish Victor with an oversized violin under his chin.
With the deadly Siberian winter approaching, and afraid that orders for their release could be revoked, swarms of exiles from all corners of Russia, Siberia, Vorkuta, the Ural Mountains, Kolyma, Novosibirsk and Kazakstan began dragging themselves toward Persia. They abandoned hard labor camps, prisons, forests, mines -- anywhere Stalin had needed slaves.
This time when they loaded into railway cars, there was no despair, but hunger, disease and death traveled with them. Rape, murder and theft were other perils of the road, especially for women or children traveling alone. On a cold day as winter approached, 10-year-old Helena Stelmach and her mother huddled off a train in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan. They joined forces with a young widow and her child in search of food and shelter. An old man in a shabby coffeehouse fed the ragged travelers and gave them shelter at a vacant house. But his was not an act of kindness. He returned that night and tried to attack the women, who fled into the icy darkness, dragging their children behind. A kinder man gave them a place to sleep in peace by the warmth of a furnace at his bakery.
The boats and small ships that ferried the Poles across the Caspian Sea on the last leg of their journey were vessels of hope. But greatly overloaded and without clean drinking water or sanitation, for some they became the bearers of death. The murky sea bottom was the graveyard for those who began to drop from typhoid and other diseases.
Many of the dying were children. Stelmach, whose father had been off fighting the Germans when mother and daughter were deported to Siberia, survived the voyage through a stroke of luck. "The ship's captain had a son suffering from hemophilia.
Mother knew nursing, and she offered to care for the boy in return for a place in the cabin and good food and water," Stelmach recalls. "All around us on the boats, people were
dropping like flies." Finally, on a bitterly cold morning, the refugees began going ashore at the Iranian port of Anzali -- broken, sick, hungry and infested with lice.
Continuing death
There was fresh snow on the ground the morning Gholam Abdol-Rahimi, a struggling photographer in Anzali, emerged from bed to witness ships disgorging disheveled refugees. "They were in bad shape, thin, ill and in rags," Abdol-Rahimi said in the "Lost Requiem," a film made in 1983 by the Iranian director Khosrow Sinai. "A friend of mine, a carpenter, used to make boxes (coffins) for them. About 50 were dying every day." Abdol-Rahimi's photographs are perhaps the most complete account of the catastrophe. But his work was never recognized or published. He died last year at age 83, recalling until the end, his friends say, the morning he woke to find the refugee ships in port.
In all, 2,806 refugees died within a few months of arriving and were buried in cemeteries throughout Iran. Their alien names and the dates on their tombstones chronicle a calamity, even to a visitor without knowledge of their history. Etched on row after row of identical tombstones is a single year of death: 1942. The majority of the arrivals -- men, women and children as young as 14 -- signed up for the new Polish army led by Gen. Wladyslaw Anders, which compiled a distinguished combat record fighting alongside the British, Americans and other Allies. For the rest, new lives began with a bus journey to refugee camps in Tehran, Isfahan and several other cities.
"The friendly Persian people crowded round the buses, shouting what must have been words of welcome, and pushed gifts of dates, nuts, roasted peas with raisins and juicy pomegranates through the open windows," wrote Krystyna Skwarko, a schoolteacher who came with her own two sick children to take charge of a growing orphanage in Isfahan. Skwarko's book, "The Invited," recounts the journey from Anzali, then through Persia and on to New Zealand, where she and 700 orphans eventually were resettled. She died in 1995.
More than 13,000 of the arrivals were children, many of them orphans whose parents had died on the way. In Russia, starving mothers had pushed their children onto passing trains to Iran in hopes of saving them.
Skwarko's impossible task was to heal the scars of war from children who had been robbed of their childhood. "I can never erase from memory the sight of an emaciated 14-year-old girl, standing apart from a newly arrived group, holding a tiny sister tightly in her arms, the smaller so thin that the skin of her arms and legs hung loosely, as on an old man," Skwarko wrote. "The older girl, Irenka Wozniak, whispered as I went up to her: 'I could manage to save only little Ewunia.' "
But amid the heart-rending tales, there are happier accounts of parents who were reunited with their children. Jewish orphans were cared for by a Jewish organization in Iran and later sent to Israel. Others went on to new lives in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and elsewhere.
Only shadows remain
Few residents of Ahvaz in southwestern Iran remember how the downtown neighborhood known as Campulu got its name. It was once "Camp Polonia," one of several camps built for the refugees in cities throughout Iran. Like Campulu, most signs of the Polish journey have faded. Boarding houses, hospitals, schools and orphanages built with Allied funds were used by the refugees for two years, but nothing remains to indicate their past. The laughter, music and cigarette smoke of the Polonia bar and restaurant in downtown Tehran, where Allied servicemen mingled with Polish girls, is a distant memory, like the bright neon "Polonia" sign that once beckoned clients. The basement bar became a chocolate factory and then the print shop it is today.
Behind the British Embassy, not far from the old Polonia, Polish prostitutes once attracted clients with their bright red headscarves, according to filmmaker Sinai. Shaved heads for the treatment of typhus were common among the refugees; the prostitutes adopted the scarves to advertise their trade. Photographs of the time show smartly dressed Polish women in long skirts working as office secretaries, peering through microscopes in laboratories or working as nurses. "Polish maids were sought by well-to-do Iranian ladies who wanted to learn makeup and Western fashions from their servants, who often had better backgrounds and education than the employers themselves," said Sinai, who was born the year before the influx. Many nights, Polish musicians organized soirees to raise money for fellow refugees. Theater and dance entertained those who could afford it. Even the poorest could revel in forgotten pleasures, such as clean beds, warmth, plentiful food and enough room to stretch their legs at night.
Sinai's "Lost Requiem" captures some of the spirit of those times. But like its name, the film is lost, never promoted and today thought to be collecting dust somewhere in the vaults of Iran's state television.
Lingering letters
Occasionally, letters arrive from abroad at the Polish Embassy in Tehran, inquiring about a dead parent or other kin buried in one of the graveyards. The embassy sends back photographs of the cemetery and grave. The letters to the embassy, or to the cemetery itself, come from Britain, New Zealand, the United States, wherever the Polish refugees who passed through Iran have settled. Last year, a woman who had passed through Iran as a child came to visit her mother's grave. The few Polish survivors still living in Iran are not close. They would rather forget the tragedy that binds them. Occasionally, they get together for Christmas at the embassy or at rare reunions. Once they are gone, the grim cemeteries will remain the only footprints through Iran of the Poles' sad, forgotten journey.
Caption: AP PHOTOS
Anna Borkowska holds a family portrait at her home in Tehran, Iran. At 83, Borkowska is probably the oldest of about a dozen Polish survivors still living in Iran. She arrived there during World War II as a Polish refugee. Her brother Victor, right in the portrait, died in a forced-labor camp in Siberia, and her father, center in the portrait, died shortly before the family was deported during Stalin's invasion.
AP PHOTO
Polish orphans often were cared for in hostels, such as this one
in Isfahan, Iran, during World War II. As many as 300,000 Polish
exiles are thought to have arrived in Iran during the war after
being released from hard-labor camps in Siberia. More than 13,000
of the refugees were children, many of them orphans whose parents
had died on the way. In Russia, starving mothers had pushed their
children onto passing trains to Iran in hopes of saving them.
Date Text: Sunday, October 8, 2000
-
PolAntek
- Member
- Posts: 534
- Joined: 23 Oct 2002 04:41
- Location: The Beautiful West Coast of Canada
-
Steve
- Member
- Posts: 949
- Joined: 03 Aug 2002 01:58
- Location: United Kingdom
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PolAntek
- Member
- Posts: 534
- Joined: 23 Oct 2002 04:41
- Location: The Beautiful West Coast of Canada
Yes. Especially when one considers that both Roosevelt AND Churchill also clearly knew that Stalin was guilty of ordering the murder of upwards of 14000 Polish military officers (widely known as the Katyn Forest massacre, although the murders occurred in three locations). And then during and after the Nuremberg trials suppressing the truth of one of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century. Questions also arise about the fate of General Wladyslaw Sikorski - leader of the Polish Government in Exile - who was killed in a mysterious plane crash. He was outspoken in his criticism of Stalin and was rapidly becoming a meddlesome nuisance as Churchill tried to keep “Uncle Joe” happy. His untimely death was most convenient and an effective means of quieting one of the only dissident voices opposed to Stalin. Was this an accident?Steve wrote: As this must have been known to the allies Roosevelts attitude to Stalin is impossable to understand.
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Benoit Douville
- Financial supporter
- Posts: 3184
- Joined: 11 Mar 2002 01:13
- Location: Montréal
I suggest to everyone to watch this moving film. Here is another great site concerning the Eastern cleansing of Eastern Poland:
http://www.stalinsethniccleansing.com/
http://www.stalinsethniccleansing.com/
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Galicia
- Member
- Posts: 349
- Joined: 17 Nov 2002 18:17
- Location: USA/UK
Stalin
Everyone knew Stalin was a murderer. Intellegence didn't lie to him. The problem the Allies had was that Stalin had an almost indespensible army, not to mention large stockpiles of ammunition.
There were several press articles in Britain regarding the fake famine in the Ukraine, (where Stalin tried to destroy Ukrainian Nationalism through murder), during the time of the famine, (1932-33).
I reccomend the movie, "Harvest of Sorrow", which was created as a controversial act to the Soviet Government. It was created in 1984.
Just as a side note:
http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/
And the communists who claim it's false, also known as "revisionists" or in the Ukrainian culture, bastards.
http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam1.html
Becareful. Their lies want to make me vomite all over myself.
Night,
Galicia.
There were several press articles in Britain regarding the fake famine in the Ukraine, (where Stalin tried to destroy Ukrainian Nationalism through murder), during the time of the famine, (1932-33).
I reccomend the movie, "Harvest of Sorrow", which was created as a controversial act to the Soviet Government. It was created in 1984.
Just as a side note:
http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/
And the communists who claim it's false, also known as "revisionists" or in the Ukrainian culture, bastards.
http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam1.html
Becareful. Their lies want to make me vomite all over myself.
Night,
Galicia.
-
PolAntek
- Member
- Posts: 534
- Joined: 23 Oct 2002 04:41
- Location: The Beautiful West Coast of Canada
From:
http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam1.html
" For the first time in human history common working people -- under the leadership of a communist party -- proved they could overthrow their exploiters and run a country far better without them. "
What a joke! History confirms the failure of Communism. And it also bears witness to the Soviet's criminality and their coldblooded murder of countless innocents.
They are ardent revisionists and have gone to great lengths to cover up their guilt. A classic example: In order to pin the blame for the Katyn Massacre on the German's, the Soviets staged an elaborate spectacle of revisiting the crime scene to re-exhume the bodies of the murdered Polish officers in order to "prove" it was not them. Too bad they were sloppy in attending to the finer details of their fabrication. The movie they made is a fascinating study into the depravity of Stalin.
" Their lies want to make me vomite all over myself " Yes Galicia, I know what you mean.
http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam1.html
" For the first time in human history common working people -- under the leadership of a communist party -- proved they could overthrow their exploiters and run a country far better without them. "
What a joke! History confirms the failure of Communism. And it also bears witness to the Soviet's criminality and their coldblooded murder of countless innocents.
They are ardent revisionists and have gone to great lengths to cover up their guilt. A classic example: In order to pin the blame for the Katyn Massacre on the German's, the Soviets staged an elaborate spectacle of revisiting the crime scene to re-exhume the bodies of the murdered Polish officers in order to "prove" it was not them. Too bad they were sloppy in attending to the finer details of their fabrication. The movie they made is a fascinating study into the depravity of Stalin.
" Their lies want to make me vomite all over myself " Yes Galicia, I know what you mean.
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mytiasmama
- New member
- Posts: 1
- Joined: 10 Jan 2023 03:32
- Location: Australia
Re: Polish women
Krystyna Skwarko: "The friendly Persian people crowded round the buses, shouting what must have been words of welcome, and pushed gifts of dates, nuts, roasted peas with raisins and juicy pomegranates through the open windows," wrote Krystyna Skwarko, a schoolteacher who came with her own two sick children to take charge of a growing orphanage in Isfahan. Skwarko's book, "The Invited," recounts the journey from Anzali, then through Persia and on to New Zealand, where she and 700 orphans eventually were resettled. She died in 1995.
More than 13,000 of the arrivals were children, many of them orphans whose parents had died on the way. In Russia, starving mothers had pushed their children onto passing trains to Iran in hopes of saving them.
Skwarko's impossible task was to heal the scars of war from children who had been robbed of their childhood. "I can never erase from memory the sight of an emaciated 14-year-old girl, standing apart from a newly arrived group, holding a tiny sister tightly in her arms, the smaller so thin that the skin of her arms and legs hung loosely, as on an old man," Skwarko wrote. "The older girl, Irenka Wozniak, whispered as I went up to her: 'I could manage to save only little Ewunia.'
Was my grandmother.
More than 13,000 of the arrivals were children, many of them orphans whose parents had died on the way. In Russia, starving mothers had pushed their children onto passing trains to Iran in hopes of saving them.
Skwarko's impossible task was to heal the scars of war from children who had been robbed of their childhood. "I can never erase from memory the sight of an emaciated 14-year-old girl, standing apart from a newly arrived group, holding a tiny sister tightly in her arms, the smaller so thin that the skin of her arms and legs hung loosely, as on an old man," Skwarko wrote. "The older girl, Irenka Wozniak, whispered as I went up to her: 'I could manage to save only little Ewunia.'
Was my grandmother.
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GregSingh
- Member
- Posts: 3747
- Joined: 21 Jun 2012 01:11
- Location: Melbourne, Australia