Display on 1930s Poles killed by Soviets

[henryk]

https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7989/Ar ... s-in-1930s

New York display honours Poles killed by Soviets in 1930s
Polish Radio 18.11.2019 07:50

An exhibition that commemorates Poles who were killed by Soviet secret police in the 1930s has gone on show in New York. The exhibition is on display at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr in New York's Manhattan borough.Image: ipn.gov.pl

An estimated 111,000 ethnic Poles were murdered in the former USSR and more than 100,000 others were deported into the Soviet interior, mainly to Kazakhstan and Siberia, as part of the so-called “Polish Operation” of the Soviet Union’s NKVD secret police in 1937 and 1938. The New York display, at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr in Manhattan, features 16 boards telling the story of some of those who were repressed at the time.

The exhibition, put together by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), is in part based on archival material the Polish government-affiliated institute has obtained from Ukrainian state archives. The display will next travel to the Polish Cultural Foundation in Clark, New Jersey, where it will be available from Wednesday.

President Andrzej Duda said in August that the NKVD's Polish Operation was "the worst genocidal act of Soviet state terror before World War II." The NKVD launched its "Polish Operation" on August 11, 1937, following an order issued by its head at the time, Nikolai Yezhov. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said last year that “the Polish Operation, approved by [Josef] Stalin and conducted by the NKVD, was one of the worst crimes against the Polish nation committed in the Soviet Union.”
(gs/pk)
Source: IAR, ipn.gov.pl

[Art]

An estimated 111,000 ethnic Poles were murdered in the former USSR

About that number of people arrested in the course of the NKVD "Polish line" operation were sentenced to death in 1937-1938. But quite many of them (tens of % at least) were actually not ethnic Poles, contrary to some erroneous ideas propagated by official Polish institutions now. Deportation of Poles and Germans from border regions was an earlier and unrelated event.

[Sergey Romanov]

About 111,000 were shot during the Polish action, but being shot or arrested or sentenced during the Polish action only meant that the victim had some sort of a connection to Poland - not necessarily an ethnic one. Many were suspected of spying for Poland, regardless of their nationality.

Unfortunately there is no complete data for the ethnicities of those who were shot. We have some data for the ethnicities of those sentenced in Sept.-Nov. 1938:

http://old.memo.ru/history/polacy/00485art.htm

Of the total number of persons convicted by the Special Troikas (105,032) 36,768 were convicted according to the "Polish line". Of these, 20,147 were Poles, 5215 were Belarusians, 4,991 Ukrainians, 3235 Russians, 1122 Jews, 490 Germans, 396 Lithuanians, 271 Latvians, 112 Estonians, 87 Czechs, 76 Gypsies, 59 Austrians, 53 Bulgarians, 47 Hungarians, 29 Romanians, 27 Greeks, 26 Moldavians, 23 Tatars and 362 "others".

Here's a report on the results of the Polish operation in Belorussia:

https://bydc.info/x-fajl/738-ob-itogakh ... 8-dokument

The national composition of those arrested is characterized by the following data;

Poles - 9,196 people.

Belarusians - 10.120

Jews (of which the vast majority of Jews are Polish Jews - political emigrants and Polish defectors) - 1,059

Russians - 383

Ukrainians - 181

Germans - 105

Latvians - 122

Lithuanians - 133

The others are 110.

So unknown thousands of those 111k were *not* ethnic Poles.

[henryk]

The source of the Polish Radio article does not state that the 111,000 were Poles.
https://ipn.gov.pl/en/news/2574,The-ope ... Sovie.html

The opening of the "Order No. 00485. Anti-Polish Operation of the NKVD in Soviet Ukraine 1937-1938" exhibition, Kiev – 20 November 2019
On 20 November, at 4:00 p.m., the President of the Institute of National Remembrance, Dr Jarosław Szarek will officially open the "Order No. 00485. Anti-Polish Operation of the NKVD in Soviet Ukraine 1937-1938" exhibition at the National Historic and Architectural Museum located at the Kiev Fortress. The opening is organized by the Institute of National Remembrance, the Polish Institute in Kiev, the Polish Embassy in Kiev and the "Kiev Fortress" National Historical and Architectural Museum.

The exhibition has so far been presented in Ukraine: in Vinnitsa, Khmelnytsky and Odessa as well as in Poland: in Warsaw, Elbląg and Gdańsk. It has also reached the U.S – on 17 November it was shown in the church. St. Stanisław Bishop and Martyr in Manhattan, New York and will be presented at the Polish Cultural Foundation in Clark on 20 November 2019.

The exhibition "Order No. 00485. Anti-Polish Operation of the NKVD in Soviet Ukraine 1937-1938" consists of 16 boards presenting the fate of people repressed as part of the anti-Polish operation carried out by the NKVD in the Soviet Union in the years 1937–1938. As part of the operation, over 143,000 people were arrested, among whom at least 111,000 were sentenced to death. Nearly 30,000 Poles were sent to labour camps. In Ukraine, where the largest concentration of the Polish population in the USSR was located, 55,928 Poles were tried, of whom 47,327 were murdered.
The exhibition prepared by the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance used documents passed on to the IPN by the Ukrainian State Archives in Odessa, Khmelnytsky and Vinnitsa in connection with the implementation of the agreement on archival cooperation concluded on 26 March 2018. It provides Polish archivists with access to thousands of documents regarding NKVD crimes committed against Poles in the years 1937–38 in the Soviet Union.

As part of cooperation with the archives in Khmelnytsky, as many as over three and a half thousand archival units (3609 units) have been acquired so far. This translates into 405,372 digital files in tiff format. Copies of 171 volumes of files were provided by the Archives of the Odessa Oblast, which constitutes 20,786 digital files and 46,458 copies of documents from 406 units from the Archives in Vinnitsa.