After September the 17th
Soviet aggression against Poland, which began on the morning of September the 17th, 1939, came as a surprise for the authorities, the civilian population, the police, the army, and the Border Protection Corps. However, this was only a small taste of what the aggressor had in store for Poles in the coming months. A group of almost 22 thousand Polish citizens selected by the Soviets were to meet a special fate, being held in three special NKVD prisoner-of-war camps prisons in the occupied territories of Poland.
“Enemies of Soviet power”
In September and October 1939, about 240 thousand Polish prisoners of war were captured. Some of them were released, some were exchanged with Germany, some were ordered to work on economic projects. However, the NKVD also selected a special group of prisoners, numbering about 15 thousand. These were officers, non-commissioned officers (including reservists), and sometimes also privates of the Polish Army, policemen and soldiers of the Border Protection Corps of all ranks, border and prison guards and a small number of civilians. These people were imprisoned in three special camps run by the NKVD in Ostashkov, Kozielsk and Starobielsk. On the 5th of March 1940, the authorities of the Soviet Union led by Stalin decided to murder these prisoners and 11 thousand prisoners (7 out of 11 thousand were murdered) held by the NKVD in prisons located in Western Belarus and Ukraine. For the prisoners from Starobielsk, the final phase of their lives began on April the 5th, 1940.
Generals, colonels, staff officers…
The camp in Starobielsk was located in the buildings of the former female monastery
Icon of the Mother of God ‘Joy of All Who Sorrow’.
In comparison to Kozielsk and Ostashkov, it was the smallest, because the Soviets only held there about 4 thousand prisoners in total. However, they were representatives of the highest officer ranks of pre-war Poland. Among the prisoners murdered there were as many as 8 generals: Leon Billewicz, Stanislaw Haller, Aleksander Kowalewski, Kazimierz Łukoski, Konstanty Plisowski, Franciszek Sikorski, Piotr Skuratowicz and Leonard Skierski (the oldest among the prisoners of all three camps – at the time of being taken captive in 1939 he was 73 years old). In Starobielsk there were also 55 colonels, 127 lieutenant colonels, 230 majors, about 1000 captains and shipmasters, about 2450 lieutenants and second lieutenants, as well as more than 50 civilians.
Kharkiv – city of death
On April the 5th, 1940, the first group of prisoners left the camp in Starobielsk. This process was repeated until May the 12th, and the situation looked almost identical every time. First, the NKVD soldiers announced a list of people who were to vacate the walls of the camp. The prisoner were the packed in and transported to the railway station, until the train they were riding reached Kharkov. From there, they were driven by truck to an internal prison in the NKVD Regional Board. Their belongings and money were taken away from them, they were then locked up in cages, where they spent anywhere from several hours to 1-2 days. In the evenings, several groups of prisoners were led out of their cells and brought to other rooms. There, after the checking of personal data and the binding of hands, they were shot in the neck. The process was organized in such a way that the prisoners who were led out of their cells awaiting further developments, heard shooting, thereby learning what fate would befall them and their colleagues. The bodies of the murdered were loaded onto trucks and buried at night in mass graves in Piatichatki (now part of Kharkov). Among the Starobielsk prisoners, only 63 people were spared from such an execution.
Half a century of waiting
The world learned of the graves of Polish prisoners from Kozielsk in 1943. However, it was still not known where the prisoners from Ostashkov and Starobielsk had been buried. Changes came about only by the turn of the 80s and 90s, when the fall of the USSR began to appear more likely. In 1991, the Polish side received permission to carry out exhumations in potential burial places of other victims. The results of the research carried out in Kharkiv removed all doubt. The forest and park zone of the city, known as the burial place of the victims of Stalinism, was also the burial spot for Polish prisoners from Starobielsk, murdered in the spring of 1940.