#history | THE WORLD OF SYBIR - Popular science portal

16 .11.1918 Independence message

The 11th of November is National Independence Day in Poland. We celebrate it to commemorate the events of 1918, when the Regency Council in office in Warsaw handed over sovereignty over the reborn Polish Army to Józef Piłsudski. This this came about was due to several factors. First and foremost, it was down to the fact that Piłsudski had arrived in the Polish capital the previous day, having previously been released from the Magdeburg fortress, having been held there since August 1917.

Helping the Youngest — Maria and Kazimierz Wodziccy

Had it not been for the initiative of Maria Wodzicka, the help of her husband Kazimierz – Consul General of the Republic of Poland in Wellington – and the wife of New Zealand Prime Minister Janet Fraser, a group of more than 700 Polish orphans and half-orphans evacuated from Siberia would probably have wandered around the world for a long time yet. But thanks to these good people, the children have found their new home in the antipodes.

06.09.1944 The agrarian reform of The Polish Committee of National Liberation

The war was still going on and the Red Army was waiting on the forefields of the fighting in Warsaw. In spite of this, the new communist authorities of Poland started to introduce reforms crucial for the shape of the future Republic. One of the inherent slogans of communism was community and collectivisation. Cooperative kolkhozy and state sovhozy had been present in the Soviet Union for many years and were symbols of the Soviet nation. Poles, who gradually fell under the Kremiln’s authority, were afraid that the same fate would befall their own farms. Those who had lived under the Soviet occupation in the years 1939-1941 were particularly afraid. But the Polish communists decided to take a different form of action…

Klara Rogalska – A Woman Who Brought Help

Klara Bauer was born in 1925 in Rzeczyca, in the Homel region. She hailed from a patriotic family, three generations of which had been marked out for deportation to Siberia. In October of 1939, her father, Wacław Bauer, a sawmill manager in Jezior, was detained by the NKVD and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp.

From the Hell of Sybir to a Mexican Paradise – In Photographs

In 1942, approximately 38,000 Polish refugees from the Soviet Union arrived in Iran alongside the newly formed Polish Army. In 1943, around 1,500 of these refugees – children and their caretakers – were sent to the Santa Rosa colony near León, Mexico.

Life and Death in Sybir – In Photographs

Photographs documenting the lives of deportees in Sybir are rare. Nevertheless, some deportees who returned to Poland managed to bring back a few photographs.