The history of Poland in the Twentieth Century is a heart-breaking story. Conquered by the Nazis, the Poles lost something like 8 million people. Not all of them died at the hands of the Nazis. In Katyn Forest in 1940, Soviet troops murdered at least 4,500 Polish soldiers who had been captured by America’s Soviet allies. The soldiers had been forced to dig the graves, and then stand beside the pit while they were gunned down. (For 49 years the Soviet government denied that the Katyn Massacre had even occurred, and in 1976, when the Polish “government in exile” in London was finally allowed to put up a monument in an English cemetery, most of the world refused to send representatives to the dedication. Only Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Liberia, South Africa, Uruguay, and the United States attended.)
When the war was over, and the Nazis destroyed, the Poles were not freed. Instead, the Soviet Union stayed. The USSR sought revenge against Germans living in Poland, pursuing them with brutality and inefficiency. Germans were not the only victims. According to R.J. Rummel’s calculations, over one and a half million Poles were murdered by their own government in just the three years 1945-48. During those same years, perhaps 3 million—perhaps twice that many*—were sent to the Gulag. Perhaps a million and a half died there, or under the Soviet oppression. The communists seized all the farmland and nationalized all formerly German-owned property, and all but the smallest businesses. When the Soviet-ordained leader of Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka, dragged his heels on some of the more extreme brutality, the Soviets forced him from power.
In the 1980s, however, things began to thaw. Members of a union movement called Solidarity had the courage to stand against the tyrants who had murdered so many of their countrymen, and in 1989, Solidarity swept the nation’s elections. Although communists had long claimed their politics would represent the genuine grass-roots demand of the working classes, the only genuine proletarian uprising of the century was a movement against communism, which was finally victorious.
Please honor the millions of Poles who suffered under the brutality of communism by making a contribution to the Victims of Communism Memorial.
*-Update: Real figures are extremely hard to come by. One author notes that in 1945, the communist government established the Special Commission For The Fight Against Economic Abuses And Sabotage; this Commission sent 10,900 Poles to the Gulag from 1945 to 1948. In 1949-1952 it sent 46,700, and in the next two years it sent another 84,200. But the Commission was not the only authority sending people to the Gulag. In October 1950, the government arrested 5,000 people in a single night in an attempt to crack down on “underground resistors.” In fact, in 1953, there were 2,500 Polish children in a special prison for juvenile political prisoners. See Andrzej Paczkowski, Poland, the “Enemy Nation,” in The Black Book of Communism 382 (S. Courtois, et al., eds. 1999).
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