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.
Helena Grodecka-Możdżeniowa, was one of about 90,000 victims of the third great deportation, which began on 29 June 1940. Most of those deported were refugees from the German occupation, mostly Jews. Poles accounted for about 11 per cent.
On April 3,1940, the first “death transport” of Polish prisoners of war set off from the Kozelsk camp.
On 4 February 1940 (presumably!), Nikolai Yezhov, one of the cruellest perpetrators of Stalinist terror, was executed.
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.”
