THE  FORGOTTEN  HOLOCAUST

We are, my children and I, the survivors of the forgotten holocaust. The one perpetrated by the Soviet Union. Soviet persecutions were much more extensive than the German. Yet, they were ignored by the West and its media.      Why ?... .... Because the perpetrators happened to be on the winning side of the war and were able to cover up behind the "iron curtain" their wartime murders and terror. In contrast to captured German records, there were no films or photos or any records of Soviet atrocities made under Stalin's dictatorship where life of each human, his education, work, accommodation, property and behaviour was totally controlled by the KGB and their masters in the Kremlin (e.g. possession of a private camera would land you in jail accused as a spy). In addition, the Soviets pursued against us, the so called "cold war". It was diverting attention from the exposure of their wartime and postwar atrocities in occupied countries. They blackmailed the Western world with atomic weapons, obtained thanks to easily stolen secrets in our free, open world by communist agents. The West, always politically pragmatic, did its best not to antagonize the Soviets and ignored their crimes against humanity. And indeed also not to antagonize the communist sympathizers in the West, the labour and socialist parties, left-wing organizations, etc. The media purposely publicized German inhumanity instead. And at the present time, the known past criminal history of Communism is being played down. Their evil history is misrepresented and revised. The truth is falsified or simply erased. On the other hand, cinema screens, TV, radio, newspapers, and all media are full of evocations of the Jewish holocaust, but other victims and victims of a different tyrant, whose perpetrators and heirs are alive and are proud of their past, are denied the same memorial. Non-Jewish victims are tragically forgotten from Holocaust remembrances.

Poland's tragic fate during Second World War is recorded by history, and the fact that 6 and a half million Polish citizens perished : over half a million fighting men and women and 6 million civilians. Of these, 2 and a half million were Polish Jews and 4 million were Polish Christians and Catholics. The infamous Auschwitz concentration camp was built by the Germans in occupied Poland, and for the first two years from 1939 it was used for exterminating ethnic Poles only. From 1942, the camp begun to be also used for exterminating Jews, Gypsies and Russian war prisoners. Poland's suffering in the concurrent holocaust under the Communist occupant, was particularly ignored and now forgotten. Professor Norman Davis, a renowned English Oxford historian writes "we now know that during the war, Stalin actually imprisoned and killed by means of mass murder and concentration camps at least twice as many people as Hitler killed during the Holocaust".

There are close connections — philosophical, political and organisational — between the Nazi and Soviet systems

Friendly meeting of communist and fascist aggressors. A crew of the Soviet tank is being welcomed by Nazi officers in the Polish town Brest where both occupying armies met in September 1939.

Brest, on the river Bug, became a border town on the new Soviet-German border that divided occupied Poland.

Above: A Red Army high ranking officer and the German officers discussing arrangements of occupation.

Below: A commander of the Soviet tank is being welcomed in Brest by Nazi officers after invasion of Poland in September 1939.

SOVIET  OPPRESSION and  TERROR : 1939-1941 In 1939, Stalin and Hitler divided Poland between themselves, subjecting Poles to a double reign of terror. Under the initial Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, in a short period from September 1939 to June 1941 (before German attack on the USSR) over 150,000 Poles were arrested and deliberately killed in prisons, including 27,500 Polish officers retreating eastwards with their troops from the German onslaught. The officers were taken prisoner by the Russians, and six months later were all individually executed by a bestial shot in the head with hands tied at the back and buried in KATYN forests. The Soviets were ignoring the international law with regard to prisoners of war which was observed even by the Nazis. In addition, at the same time, nearly 2 million Poles, men, women and children  —  I was one of them  —  were deported to slave labour concentration camps and gulags in Siberia and other remote areas of the USSR.  Half of the prisoners and deportees have died within the first two years due to excessive hard work, harsh treatment, primitive living conditions, cold, continuous malnutrition, hunger and starvation, exposure to severe climates, lack for clothing, lice and disease. This was Communist Russia's cheap way of exterminating people. It was primitive and cruel but it was just as effective as the Nazi gas chambers. Continuously practiced from the times of the Lenin's October Revolution, it was just a natural part of the Communist - Socialist system. This treatment of Poles by the Soviet Union is still an unfamiliar story to foreigners. News of what was going on came only scantily to the West between 1939 and 1941. Later in the war, when Britain and the United States became the allies of the USSR, discussion of this episode was discouraged and ignored by the media. During the post-war years the true story emerged only in fragments , and was overshadowed by the more spectacular, documented and better-publicised Nazi behaviour. Yet in its brutality and the sheer scale of its cold-blooded attempt to obliterate the Polish nation physically and culturally, this Communist Soviet occupation far outdid, without comparison, the crimes committed by the Germans.

For the first two years of the war the Soviets supported the Nazis against the Allies : politically, militarily and economically. While British, Polish and Australian airmen, sailors and soldiers were loosing their lives in the West due to German war activities, the Russians supplied Hitler with food, agricultural products, wheat, petrol, oil, timber, and other war materials, as well as disseminated anti-western pro-nazi propaganda. There was close cooperation of Soviet NKVD (KGB) with Nazi GESTAPO.

The Soviet - Nazi friendship lasted until June 1941, when ever-victorious Hitler decided not to share Europe with Stalin. He betrayed his partner in crime and invaded the Soviet Union itself, advancing with lightning speed right up to Moscow and Stalingrad. After German attack, the Soviets unexpectedly found themselves on the same side as the Allies. But they did not share our cause for fighting : the defence of freedom and democracy. Using their usual methods of deceit, the Soviets proclaimed the war as "the Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland", implying an illusion of fight for the former Russian Fatherland. But they really had in mind the survival of their own dictatorial power devoted to communist domination and imperialism.

From 1944, with the Red Army advance on the eastern war front, and after the end of war, the oppression continued. 750 thousands more Poles were deported to the USSR gulags from Poland "liberated" by the Soviet "ally". Most of the victims were former members and their families of the Polish Homeland Army, the largest and most effective underground resistance anywhere in German-occupied Europe. They were branded by the Soviets as the "bourgeois organisation" taking orders from the "fascist" Polish Government in London. In addition, some 20 thousands former Polish underground leaders were tracked down, imprisoned and executed by the Soviet judges and communist puppet regime installed in Warsaw by the KGB.

Similar atrocities were happening in other Soviet occupied countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, East Germany, part of Finland, Moldova, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).

THE SOVIET STORY Watch 10 min. trailer of a Latvian film made in 2008 Trailer has English narration (Polish and Latvian subtitles) (part 1)

The Soviet Story - part 2

AND  NOWADAYS, 
AFTER  THE  COLLAPSE  OF  THE  RUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK EVIL EMPIRE

... and nowadays, after the collapse of the Bolshevik Russia — which in 1939 stabbed in the back and butchered Poland occupying my home town Pinsk — our house with large garden grounds, as well as my grandfather's country home and landed estate were not returned to Poland. One of newly created post-Soviet states, Belarus, has taken over our properties.

Contacts with new bureaucracies of the former Soviet Union are not very easy. They have retained the communist old guard, soviet mentality and attitudes. The old guard have never been punished for their crimes. There have been no trials, not even truth commissions or government inquiries and debates. Most of the post-Soviet republics are run by former communists. In Belarus there is no democracy still in the year 2009. The "reforms" didn't go very far. Under the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko, things there haven't changed much.

The new Russian Federation salvaged the remnants of the Soviet Empire and still tries to act as a world power using their communist tactics of threats and blackmail to other countries. They kept the Soviet national anthem with revised words by the same author. Under excuse of following the American example of "war on terror" they bloodily subjugated Chechnia, they intervened militarily in Georgia and now in 2009 they are trying to subjugate Ingushetia. Press freedom in Russia is continuing to be intimidated. Twenty two Russian reporters plus a number of people who have spoken out against current administration, have been mysteriously murdered.

However, they suffered a serious setback when they attempted to place Ukraine under direct Russian political control. It backfired as Ukrainian people took to the streets launching the famous Orange revolution.

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