“We managed to record twenty-five interviews, with over fifty hours of material” revealed Dr. Hubert Chudzio, director of Krakow's Centre for the Documentation of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlement, which was founded this year.
“Each of these reports carries a different emotional charge,” he said, noting that some families had survived the ordeal together, whilst others had been compelled to watch loved ones perish.
Chudzio took a team of doctoral and masters students from Krakow's Pedagogical University (to which the centre is affiliated) on the Australian expedition.
The group had been invited by the Siberian Association of Western Australia, which was celebrating its twentieth anniversary.
During the Second World War, Moscow oversaw the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to far-flung corners of the Soviet Union, primarily Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Figures covering the initial deportations of 1940-1941 range between 330,000 people (wartime Russian figures), and in excess of 1 million (wartime Polish figures).
Salvation came to many following an official Russian amnesty after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, an action that forced Stalin to ally himself with Great Britain, and by default her Polish allies.
Thousands gained passage to Iran, where an armed force was formed under General Wladyslaw Anders. The so-called Polish Second Corps fought as part of the British Army,
However, noted historian Andrzej Paczkowski estimates that ten percent of the deportees perished in exile.
In 1944, when the Red Army returned, the transports to Siberia began again.
After the war, the majority of the deportees who had left the Soviet Union during the amnesty chose not to return to Poland following the installation of a Moscow-backed communist regime.
Large numbers of deportees found new homes in America, Australia, Canada, Great Britain and South Africa, the latter two of which Dr Chudzio has already visited with students as part of the documentation programme.
The centre is currently planning a second trip to Great Britain, as well as the documentation of survivors in Poland. (nh)
Source: PAP