On 24 March 1942, the first stage of the evacuation of the soldiers serving in the so-called Anders Army from the Soviet Union to Persia began. About 78,000 exiles, who joined the Polish army and 37 thousand civilians, including about 18,000 Polish children were evacuated in total.
The date of 11 November 1918, being the day on which Poland regained its independence, is a symbolic date. Exactly on that day, an armistice ending the First World War was concluded in a wagon in the forest of Compiègne.
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.
The Polish-Bolshevik war broke out on 14 February 1919. The site of the first confrontation was the town of Mosty near Szczuczyn in the Grodno region, where Polish Army units halted the Red Army’s march.
On 31 October 1906 Marian Malinowski set off, as he himself put it, “on a journey into the unknown at government expense.”