On the morning of 13 April 1940, NKVD soldiers came banging against the doors of the homes of more than 60,000 residents of eastern Poland. They ordered them to pack quickly and loaded them into cattle wagons.

There was a time when large numbers of Poles in the Soviet Union lost their lives simply because of their origin and surname. One of the elements of the “Great Terror” unleashed by Stalin in 1937-1938 was the so-called “Polish Operation”, in which NKVD officers, on suspicion of espionage, mu

Father Jan Cieplak was auxiliary bishop of the Mogilev archdiocese, at that time the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the world, covering the whole of Russia up to Sakhalin.

On 31 October 1906 Marian Malinowski set off, as he himself put it, “on a journey into the unknown at government expense.”

On the night of 6 to 7 July (24/25 June old style) 1866, 5,000 kilometres east of their homeland, a group of January insurgents sent to Baikal for penal labour stirred up a rebellion, disarmed their guards and tried to forge an escape route to Mongolia.

“Poles! The hour of vengeance has come. Today die or prevail! Let us go, and let your breasts be Thermopylae for your enemies!”