Polish Poetry From the Gulags, edited by Halina Ablamowicz and Marek Jan Chodakiewicz. 2008. Edwin Mellen Press, Lewison
This book has many moving poems written by the Polish deportees to the interior of the USSR. However, I focus my review on the scholarly article by historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz. The crimes of Communism are relevant especially because many Holocaust supremacist and left-leaning academics ignore or minimize them. In fact, nowadays Communism is spelled with a small “c”. This sounds like an Orwellian minimization.
POLISH DEPORTEE NUMBERS QUESTIONED
Consider Polish gulag numbers. The traditional figure for Polish deportees has been about 1.5 million, as determined, for example, by General Anders, and corroborated by émigré studies. See:
However, in recent decades, Russians have, based on archival sources, claimed that only 300,000–400,000 Poles were deported. What are the facts?
UNRELIABILITY OF SOVIET ARCHIVES
Historian Chodakiewicz writes, “Serious scholars, however, have traditionally questioned the veracity of the Soviet statistics. The Communists notoriously falsified them at every turn. Why would it be different with the statistics of the deportations from eastern Poland? Further, the total of ‘over 300,000’ deportees would have made sense if the secret police order of October 11, 1939, to keep 25 people per cattle truck had been obeyed.” (p. 47).
However, hundreds if not thousands of Polish and Jewish testimonies indicate that vastly more than 25 humans were crammed into each car: from 27 to 85, with an average of about 45. (p. 47). This means that the Soviet figure of 25 per car was a prescribed number, and not some kind of empirically-measured and averaged number of the actual number of deportees per car!
In fact, the Soviet claim of 300,000 is not supported by any internal data. Chodakiewicz comments, “Further, there are hardly any case studies of the deportations at the source and destination, transport by transport. Until such micro-studies materialize, we may just as well claim that between ‘over 300,000’ and 1.25 million Polish citizens were deported to Siberia.” (p. 47).
The foregoing was published in 2008. Chodakiewicz (personal communication, 2024) indicates that the foregoing is still his position on this subject.
Chodakiewicz is not alone. Other scholars have noted the fact that Communist archives are not reliable. See:
https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/looting-murder-postwar-not-only-to-jews-naimark/
https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jedwabne-1949-lomza-trials-unreliable-david-fox/
THE KRESY EXPELLEES AND THE FORCED COMMUNIZATION OF POLAND (1944-ON)
With reference to the “liberation” of Poland by the Red Army in 1944, Chodakiewicz writes, “In the newly ‘liberated’ Eastern Borderlands an estimated 50,000 Poles were dispatched to Siberia. However, over 2 million Poles were expelled from their households, expropriated, and shipped off destitute and downtrodden to ‘people’s Poland.” (pp. 54-55).
In addition, “Between 1944 and 1947, at least 100,000 people were shipped off to Siberia from the territory of ‘people’s’ Poland alone.” (p. 54). It was the gulag all over again.
