'The holocaust no one talks about'

'The holocaust no one talks about' Poles mark 65th anniversary of mass Second World War deportations

EDMONTON -- An armed Soviet guard tore the tiny, dead infant from his mother's hands and hurled the body into the snow.

Its mother's scream was cut off by the cattle-car door slamming closed, a bolt was pushed into place and the train lurched on, carrying her away.

"The mother lost her mind and ended up in an asylum, but she wasn't the only woman who went mad," says Janina Chodkiewicz-Muszynska of Edmonton, who travelled with her mother and four siblings for four weeks on a similar train.

"Such incidents happened regularly. Other people died of hunger or disease. They were tossed into the snow without any kind of burial."

For Poles, 2005 marks the 65th anniversary of what's known as The Year of Deportations -- four mass population displacements during the early years of the Second World War.

Last week, many of Edmonton's Polish community of 40,000 gathered at the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church to commemorate what some call "The Holocaust No One Talks About."

Fear kept people quiet, says Edmontonian Anne Kaczanowski, whose father was deported and imprisoned before he came to Canada after the war.

"For decades, Poles were afraid to say anything because of what might happen to relatives and friends still living in Soviet-controlled Poland," Kaczanowski says.

More than two million people were deported to remote parts of the former USSR to work as slave labourers on communal farms or in penal colonies. Most were displaced in four deportations between 1939 and 1941.

The people seized were mainly Poles, but there were also Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians and others who lived in the eastern part of Poland overrun by the Russians. Some were Jews.

"Many, particularly the young, sick and elderly, died on train journeys that usually took weeks," Chodkiewicz-Muszynska says.

"Malnutrition and disease -- particularly dysentery and typhoid fever -- later took their toll in camps."

Some modern historians estimate about one million Poles and others died at the hands of the Soviets.

Among them were 15,000 Polish army officers who were rounded up in the fall and winter of 1939 and executed in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, and other places.

Most were civilian professionals mobilized in 1939 for the fight against the Nazis. They were professors, teachers, doctors, diplomats, civil servants and religious leaders. They were found with their hands tied behind their backs. Each had a bullet in the back of his skull.

"It's only in recent time the Russians admitted it was the work of the NKVD, their secret police," says Kazia Kolankowska, a local Polish historian and writer.

Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The Polish Army was asked to hold the Nazis for two weeks while its western allies launched a major offensive.

The Poles fulfilled their task, but the planned offensive didn't happen. On Sept. 17, the Soviets, who had made a secret pact with the Nazis, made a treacherous attack from the east.

"That day, Soviet tanks rolled into our town of Prozoroki, in the province of Wilno," says Chodkiewicz-Muszynska, who was 10 years old at the time. "The terror soon set in."

Here is another one:

'Atrocities' trial shakes Poland's victim image
Source: UK Times
Published: 06/14/01
Author: ROGER BOYES

FROM ROGER BOYES IN OPOLE, POLAND

GERMAN women were drowned in latrines and prisoners were buried alive during post-war internment in Poland, according to witnesses at the trial of a Polish camp commandant.

Czelaw Geborski, a stooped, snowy-haired pensioner of 76, is accused of murdering German women who, after the Second World War, were herded into deportation camps prior to being expelled from Silesia.

His trial is the first to be held in post-communist Europe for crimes committed against Germans. About 14 million of them were expelled from territory that is now part of Poland and the Czech Republic; two million died mainly of hunger, exhaustion and disease as they trekked westwards.

The revelations, coupled with the disclosure that Polish villagers took part in a bloodthirsty massacre of Jews during the war, have forced Poland to reassess its image of itself as one of the primary victims of Hitler.

The Silesian atrocities occurred in 1945 and 1946, after the end of the war. The Soviet Union laid claim to what was once eastern Poland and in return Poles gained territory in the west. Germans living there were thrown out. Once resettled in Germany they formed powerful political associations that kept alive memories of camps such as Lamsdorf (now known as Lambinowice) 30 kilometres from Opole.

Mr Geborski, sitting in the dock next to his often embarrassed lawyer, interrupts loudly as the witnesses try to reconstruct everyday life in the camp. “It was like a holiday camp!” he barks out, banging his stick on the floor. “They all had their own beds and three modest meals.”

The fact is that in the autumn of 1945 most Poles were in no mood to treat the Germans generously: five years of occupation, a comprehensive system of labour and concentration camps, and executions on street corners made the activities behind the high fences of Lamsdorf camp seem like small beer.

Nonetheless, more than 1,000 people are said to have died there and some of the stories emerging from the witness stand are horrific. If the queue for the women’s latrines was too long the guards would simply shoot the waiting women with a machinegun. Babies were separated from their mothers and allowed to starve. The mothers were chased with sticks around the periphery of the camp.

The charges against Mr Geborski have been narrowed down to the night of October 4, 1945. Fire broke out in barrack room 12. Women prisoners struggled to throw sand on the flames. Uniformed Poles, according to witnesses, shot at them and pushed them into the blaze.

“I can hear their screams even now,” said Helmut Gerlitz, now 62, who as a six-year-old boy stared out of the window of his hut. At least three women died, and others were seriously wounded and mutilated.

Mr Geborski claims that the prisoners started the fire themselves to stage a diversion and escape in the chaos. He merely used his right to order shots to be fired at escaping prisoners. Witnesses say, however, that graves were dug in advance of the blaze, suggesting that the incident was planned by the camp administration.

Strictly speaking much of what the witnesses say amounts to hearsay. At any kind of factual mistake, Mr Geborski interrupts and demands clarification. He does so in the strident tone of someone who spent much of the 1950s and 1960s working for the communist secret police.

Mr Geborski has been charged twice before. Each time the proceedings were dropped because he enjoyed high political protection. The Polish Minister for Recovered Territory - Mr Geborski’s ultimate political boss - was Wladyslaw Gomulka, like Mr Geborski an ex-partisan. The charges against Mr Geborski were dropped in 1958: by then Gomulka had become Poland’s Communist Party chief.

The German authorities, too, did not push very hard for a trial. To support openly the cause of the expelled Germans was to risk being branded a nationalist, someone intent on challenging the legitimacy of the German-Polish border.

So Mr Geborski has benefited from the long silence of politicians. His defence lawyer wishes on him a similar silence: Mr Geborski is not shy about denouncing what he says is the absurdity of a Pole being punished for crimes against Germans after a long and bloody war.

For medical reasons Mr Geborski is allowed to sit in court for only three hours a day. The result is slow proceedings.

The trial continues.

Now this really burns me up, something fierce.

Of course there were atrocities and other bad things committed by both sides during that war--as there always have been, are now, and always will be.

But it is a matter of proportion.

Sometime in late 2001, I purchased a book, "The German Century," written by a German who apparently was trying to be politically-correct.

The book is mostly photographs, only about half of it text, and covered Germany from 1901 until 2000.

It dedicated two long paragraphs to the slaughter of the Jews 1933-1945.....and three medium-sized paragraphs to the "atrocities" of the Czechs and the Poles to Germans as populations were shifting in mid-1945.

Yes, yes, yes, it is too bad these Germans were mistreated and all that--it is however a perfectly understandable reaction--but where is the sense of proportion?

What are a few tens of thousands of Germans deprived of property and physically abused, as compared with 6,000,000 Jews deprived not only of property but of life? Or all the Poles? Or all the Ukrainians?

To adequately cover the crimes of the Czechs and Poles against Germans, as compared with the crimes of the Germans against the Jews and the Poles (and many others); three medium-sized paragraphs for the German victims seems appropriate.....as compared with shelves and shelves of entire books, miles of shelves, in small print, for the Jewish, Polish, and other victims.

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