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

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.

This is what journalist Bruno Korotyński wrote in 1924 about the slaughter in Warsaw’s Praga district. It was one of the last, and at the same time most tragic, episodes of the Kościuszko Uprising. On 4 November 1794, after the Polish army had been defeated, Cossacks slaughtered about 20,000 civ

Prayer of the Bar Confederates before the Battle of Lanckorona, oil painting by Artur Grottger.