What can literature do?
Włodzimierz Bolecki: If Mackiewicz’s and Herling’s books had been confined to recording Soviet crimes, they would probably have been mere illustrations of the information that circulated in the international public sphere at the time. Meanwhile, both Mackiewicz and Herling wrote their books with the intention of showing the reality they encountered in the Soviets as a universal threat to all people. They treated Katyn and Yertsevo as names whose horror should speak to every human being.
Polish war refugees in Santa Rosa
Witold Chmielewski: Among 40,000 civilians evacuated from the “inhuman land” over 18,000 were children and young people. About 1500 were resettled to Mexico.
The Children of Sybir in New Zealand
Witold Chmielewski: About 700 Polish children deported in 1940-1941 by Soviets to Sybir, escaped in 1943 to New Zealand…
The Photographs of the Children of Esfahan
Parisa Damandan: On 10 April 1942, the first group of children accompanied by two nuns, and a few other caretakers and instructors, arrived in Esfahan on several buses.
They were too late to join the Anders Army
The Tadeusz Kosciuszko 1st Infantry Division, hastily formed in the autumn of 1943 at Lenino, underwent its bloody baptism of fire. Most of the soldiers who had joined its ranks only a few months earlier ended up in the Soviet Union as victims of deportations and...
Sandarmokh. When the Graves Speak
Sergei Lebedev: In the days since 24 February 2022, any discussion of Russia’s future is inextricably linked to the responsibility – political, legal, and moral – for its attack on Ukraine.
Jailed and Their Jailers: The Memory of Victims and Perpetraitors in Modern Russia
Elena Racheva: Stalin’s head was found in the garden. With the tip of his nose broken, with a crack across his cheek, and a half-worn mustache…
Photojournalism: The Kolyma Planet
Tomasz Kizny: Kolyma. The first explorer who arrived there was a Polish geologist Jan Czerski, who was sent to Siberia for a participation in the January Uprising. By the end of the 1920s in mountains named after him gold was found. This is how the tragedy of Kolyma began – the largest in terms of forced labour and industry part of the Gulag. It operated on the area of 3 million square kilometres, so on over 10% of the whole area of the USSR.
Memories of Maria (deported in 1949) from Usolye-Sibirskoye
“The Golgotha of the East began for my family (mother, father, grandmother, brother Andrzej and me) on March 25, 1949, at night in Vilnius…” – recalled in 2002 a 55-year-old former deportee to Eastern Siberia. She was deported as a few years old girl, with her whole family. It is a letter written to a close person in Warsaw. We know nothing about either sender, much less the receiver. And the letter that recently came to me comes from the collection of late Roland Młynik from Warsaw…