Second deportation from the eastern lands

At dawn on 13 April 1940, a Saturday, operational groups of the NKVD knocked on the doors of thousands of flats in Lwów, in Białystok and in hundreds of other towns of the occupied Kresy. They took the wives, children and parents of officers of the Polish Army, policemen, prison guards and officials, held since the autumn in NKVD prisoner-of-war camps and prisons. This was how the second mass deportation of Polish citizens from the lands seized by the Soviet Union began. According to NKVD documents, about 61,000 people were taken, the vast majority of them women, children and the elderly, to the steppes of northern Kazakhstan. On those same days, often at the same hours, officers of the same institution were shooting their husbands, fathers and sons at Katyn, Kharkiv and Kalinin.

Families of “enemies of Soviet power”

The first deportation, on 10 February 1940, had struck mainly the countryside: military settlers and foresters with their families. The second hit towns and small towns. The decision on it was taken on 2 March 1940, three days before the Politburo, at the proposal of Lavrentiy Beria, decided to shoot Polish prisoners of war and prisoners. Historians see the two decisions as two parts of one plan: if the men were to be killed, their families, who might ask about them and preserve their memory, had to be removed from the Kresy. Subject to resettlement to Kazakhstan for ten years were the families of prisoners from the camps at Kozelsk (PL), Starobelsk and Ostashkov and the families of prisoners from the western oblasts of Ukraine and Belarus, including those arrested for underground activity, as well as the families of people detained trying to cross the German-Soviet border illegally. The lists included relatives of officials, officers, policemen, gendarmes and prison guards, teachers, community activists, landowners, merchants, industrialists and bankers. In the Soviet logic of collective responsibility, it was enough to be the wife, mother or child of a man judged an enemy.

Directives and reality

The details of the operation were set out in NKVD directive no. 892/B of 7 March 1940. On entering a flat, the operational group was to search it for weapons, “counter-revolutionary literature” and foreign currency, inform the family of the resettlement and explain its procedure. Each family member could take up to 100 kilograms of luggage. A directive of 20 March indicated to the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the Kazakh SSR the oblasts where the exiles were to live, and on 4 April Beria’s deputy Vsevolod Merkulov ordered that they be issued passports forbidding them to leave the designated place. On 10 April the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR approved the instruction and decided to carry out the resettlement on the night of 12 to 13 April.

The historian Krzysztof Łagojda, comparing NKVD instructions with more than a hundred accounts by exiles, concluded that the course of each operation depended on the officer commanding the group. The luggage that was supposed to be allowed for each person was often granted to the whole family. The time to pack ranged from two hours to a dozen or so minutes, and some people were driven from their homes with nothing. Women were told they were going to their husbands. Adam Zaleski, then the twelve-year-old son of a captain from the Starobelsk camp, remembered that at five in the morning four officers with pistols and four soldiers with bayonets entered his mother’s flat: “Eight armed men had come to arrest a woman with two small children.” Asked where they were going, the officer replied: “To your husband. He wishes you to come to him.” The boy’s father was murdered in Kharkiv.

The operational groups sometimes included neighbours of those being deported, Ukrainians and Belarusians, incited by propaganda to settle accounts with the “Polish lords”. During searches the officers took watches, money and valuables. It happened, however, that one of them whispered to take as much food as possible because the road would be long, or told them to take a sewing machine, “because you will earn your bread on it”. According to Stanisław Ciesielski, the April exiles remembered more instances of kindness than the February ones, because the operational groups dealt mainly with women, children and the elderly.

Fifty transports

People were taken by cart and lorry to the stations, where the wagons sometimes stood for two days before a train was full. According to NKVD documents, about 50 transports set out with the April contingent. A wagon carried as many as 60 people. Crowds gathered by the trains and passed bread through the windows. Sometimes this was allowed, sometimes mounted militia dispersed the people. The instruction promised a hot meal once a day and 600 grams of bread per person, and in each transport a doctor, a medical orderly and two nurses. The accounts speak of nettle soup every other day, 300 grams of bread, water brought only on the seventh day and medical staff without medicines. The journey lasted from two weeks to a month.

The spring weather meant that fewer people died on the way than in February, when the frost killed. But small children and the elderly did die. Bodies were carried out at stations or left on the embankment. How many died in the transports is not known, because NKVD transport reports did not record deaths scrupulously. Stanisław Ciesielski estimated mortality in the whole April group up to July 1941 at no more than 2.5 per cent. Daniel Boćkowski, comparing the four deportations, judged the April one the least deadly.

On the steppes of Kazakhstan

The families from April were not placed in closed special settlements under NKVD command, as the settlers in February had been. In documents they were called “administratively exiled” (administrativno-vysylnye). In theory they could choose their own housing and work, but they were not allowed to leave the district. Transports from western Ukraine were sent to the oblasts of North Kazakhstan (PL), Pavlodar (PL), Kustanay (PL), Semipalatinsk (PL) and Aktyubinsk (PL), and those from western Belarus to North Kazakhstan, Pavlodar and Akmolinsk (PL). At the destination stations they were put down and taken out to kolkhozes and sovkhozes. People sometimes waited on the steppe for several days under the open sky before anyone came for them.

The authorities provided no housing. The exiles looked for a corner with local Kazakhs and Russians and paid for it with what they had brought from home, or dug dugouts and built huts of clay. Among those deported were many educated people who had lived in towns before the war and were unaccustomed to heavy physical work. Work was scarce and badly paid. In June 1940 the NKVD of the Kazakh SSR reported difficulties in employing Poles in the kolkhozes, and the republic’s authorities complained to Moscow that they did not know what to do with them. When the things to barter ran out, hunger began. A girl from Lwów, deported at the age of twelve to the Kustanay oblast, recalled working on a kolkhoz and begging for food at Christmas. Historians compare Kazakhstan of those years to a “great prison without a roof”. It could not be left, and flight into the steppe, with winter blizzards, summer heat and wolves, usually meant death.

From the Kazakh kolkhozes women sent letters to Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov, not knowing that the addressees were no longer there. The Chodorowski family from Knyszyn near Białystok lost two sons, reserve second lieutenants, murdered at Katyn a few days apart, while their parents were travelling to Kazakhstan at the time. Only the ailing mother returned from exile, in 1946. The Museum of Siberian Memory in Białystok recalls the family of Józef Kubala of Wasilków, deported to Kazakhstan on the same day he died at Katyn.

How many people were deported

Soviet documents give 60,667 or 61,092 people. Polish historians, including researchers of the IPN, usually accept the rounded figure of about 61,000. According to NKVD data cited by the Polish Press Agency, Poles made up 68 per cent of those deported, Belarusians 13.4, Ukrainians 12.3 and Jews 4.3 per cent. Women and children made up, according to various studies, from 70 to 80 per cent. Earlier Polish historiography, relying on accounts and wartime estimates, assumed that 240,000–320,000 people were deported in April. Some researchers and Siberian exiles’ communities still consider the figures from NKVD documents to be understated, because they cover only people taken away in railway transports.

What it brought

The April deportation was the second part of the same operation as the Katyn massacre. The killing of nearly 22,000 prisoners of war and prisoners and the deportation of their families was meant to remove from the Kresy a stratum that could direct Polish social life and resist Sovietisation. Two months later, in June 1940, the NKVD carried out the third deportation, aimed at refugees from central and western Poland.

The exiles in Kazakhstan regained relative freedom after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, when under the Sikorski-Mayski agreement the “amnesty” of August 1941 covered them. Some of them reached the army of Gen. Władysław Anders and left the Soviet Union with it in 1942. Many families only then began to look for their husbands and fathers, whose fate they learned in 1943 or even later. In 2007 the Sejm designated 13 April the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Katyn Massacre (PL), uniting in memory the murdered and their deported families.