Siberia - Gulag - Katyń

31.03.06, 22:06
Just a little about the past for future reference.
To cut a really long story short.

Poles were not only presecuted by the Germans during the war but laso the
Soviet government did their bit and sent many Poles way waaaaaaaaaaay East to
work in the Urals. So that's why many Poles today have a grudge to the
Russians that under the pretext of the fact that they were liberating Poland,
they actually invaded us and put many of us to the grave....
Many Poles were packed into cattle trains and sent thousand of km's into the
freezing plains of kazahstan, were they were forced to work in labour camps.

Siberia/Kazachstan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia
Siberia (Russian: Сиби́рь, common English transliterations: Sibir’, Sibir;
Tatar: Seber) is a vast region of Russia and northern Kazakhstan constituting
almost all of northern Asia. It extends eastward from the Ural Mountains to
the Pacific Ocean and southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-
central Kazakhstan and the borders of both Mongolia and China. All but the
extreme south-western area of Siberia lies in Russia, and it makes up about
56% of that country's territory.




Gulag:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei,
or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to
signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the
system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor
camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps,
children's camps, transit camps. Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean
the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners
once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the
transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of
families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths


Katyn;
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_Massacre
The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest Massacre and the Katyn
Incident (Polish: Katyń), was a mass execution of Polish citizens by the
Soviet Union (USSR) in the year before the USSR entered World War II.[1]
Estimates of the number of Polish citizens executed at three mass-murder
sites in the spring of 1940 range from some through 14,540[2][3],and through
21,857 [1] to 27,700.[4] Most of those killed were reserve officers taken
prisoner during the 1939 Polish September Campaign, but the dead also
included many civilians.[5] Since Poland's conscription system required every
unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer,[6] the Soviets
were thus able to round up much of the Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian and
Belarusian intelligentsias of Polish citizenship.

The term "Katyn massacre" originally referred to the massacre, at Katyn
Forest, near the village of Gnezdovo, near Smolensk, Russia, of Polish
military officers confined at the Kozelsk prisoner-of-war camp. The term
subsequently came to be applied also to the execution of prisoners of war
held at Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps,[3] and political prisoners in West
Belarus and West Ukraine,[4] shot on Stalin's orders at Katyn Forest, at the
NKVD (Narodny Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del) Smolensk headquarters and at an
abattoir in that same city,[1] and at prisons in Kalinin (Tver), Kharkiv,
Moscow and other Soviet cities.[5]

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Ok, I just had to get thru that little history lesson, somehow I feel it is
my responsibility to fill others in....
Long story wink
    • usenetposts Re: Siberia - Gulag - Katyń 31.03.06, 22:50
      I've been to Katyn, by the way. Once driving on the way back from Moscow I paid
      it a visit. It was quite well signposted from the road around Smolensk.
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