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Sandarmokh: Dramaturgy of meanings

Irina Flige: The Polish cross, as the Catholic cross is often called in Russia, was one of the first to appear in Sandarmokh – on the day of the opening of the Memorial Cemetery for Victims of Terror. Only those who really wanted to be ready on time – on the important day of the sixtieth anniversary of the Great Terror – could make it in such a short time.

The stone chair of Bolek Augustis

Urszula Dąbrowska: The four volunteers from Bialystok crossed 12 time zones (twice), flew over 20,000 km. They visited the North and South Island, travelling about 2,500 km by car to meet with more than a hundred representatives of the local Polish community in three of New Zealand’s largest cities: Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

Remembering the Gulag

‘I don’t want anything. I won’t say anything’, the old man blurted out. ‘If I tell you, you’ll leave, and then what? They’ll send me back to the camps?’ – Elena Racheva writes about the complicated memory of GULag in modern Russia.

What can literature do?

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.

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They were too late to join the Anders Army

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...

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Sandarmokh. When the Graves Speak

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.

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Photojournalism: The Kolyma Planet

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.

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Memories of Maria (deported in 1949) from Usolye-Sibirskoye

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…

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