Third deportation from the eastern lands

On the night of Friday 28 to Saturday 29 June 1940, officers of the NKVD began in the eastern lands of the Republic, incorporated into the Ukrainian and Belarusian SSRs, the third mass deportation of Polish citizens into the interior of the Soviet Union. This time the targets were neither settlers nor the families of prisoners of war and of the arrested, but people who in the autumn of 1939 had fled east from the Germans. In NKVD documents they were called “bezhentsy”, that is, refugees. Most of them were Jews from western and central Poland. The operation lasted several days, and according to Soviet documents it resulted in the deportation of between about 76,000 and more than 90,000 people. They were sent to special settlements and camps in the Russian North, the Urals and Siberia.

Refugees from the west

In September 1939, hundreds of thousands of people set off east before the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht. When on 17 September the Red Army crossed the border and at the end of the month Germany and the USSR drew a dividing line, many of them found themselves on the Soviet side. Estimates of their number vary. The historian Elżbieta Trela-Mazur gives 336,000 refugees of various nationalities, mainly Poles and Jews, while Anna Pyżewska of the Museum of Siberian Memory (PL) cites estimates according to which between 200,000 and 350,000 Jews alone fled east. For Jews the German occupation meant violence, plunder and humiliation from the first days, so the Soviet zone seemed to many of them the lesser evil. Some crossed the new border illegally, after the fighting had ended.

Poverty awaited them there. Refugees crowded into Lwów, Białystok, Brest and other towns by the new border, huddled in synagogues and other makeshift shelters, and housing, work and food were lacking. Already in the autumn of 1939 the Soviet authorities, “unloading” the overcrowded cities, sent tens of thousands of them to the eastern oblasts of Belarus and Ukraine, and recruited some to work deep inside the USSR. Those who got to know Soviet life there often wanted only to return home. After the annexation of the eastern lands and the decree of 29 November 1939 on Soviet citizenship, the refugees were also subjected to passportisation. Some did not want to accept Soviet passports, because it meant renouncing the prospect of returning home, and the Soviet authorities read such a refusal as proof of disloyalty.

Registering to return

Under an agreement signed on 16 November 1939, Germany and the USSR exchanged populations: Germans from the lands occupied by the Red Army went west, and Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians from the German zone went east. In the spring of 1940 the exchange was extended to refugees, and mixed commissions accepted applications from people who wanted to return home under German occupation. Very many came forward. According to a document of the German Foreign Ministry, cited by Russian historians, about 164,000 people declared a wish to leave. Among them were also Jews who after several months of life in the Soviet state concluded that they would have it easier in their family homes, and some received letters from relatives saying that life under the Germans was bearable.

The Germans, however, accepted above all Poles, and only those who had lived before the war in the lands taken by the Reich. They did not want to accept Jews at all, although some managed to cross to the west. The commissions ended their work on 5 June 1940. For the NKVD, the lists of those wishing to leave became a ready-made register of people who had expressed dislike of Soviet power. As Pyżewska writes, “there was no place in the Soviet state for the disloyal”.

The decision

According to published Soviet documents, refugees who had applied to leave for the German-held territories and had not been accepted were already named in the resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of 2 March 1940, under which in April the families of prisoners of war and of the arrested were deported to Kazakhstan. The government approved the NKVD instruction on their resettlement on 10 April, and the operation was postponed until the resettlement commissions finished their work. The operation was prepared and carried out by the NKVD of the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, and in the field by the republican commissariats of internal affairs of Ukraine and Belarus. Unlike the families in April, the refugees were directed by the NKVD not to “free exile” but, as “special settlers-refugees”, to special settlements under the supervision of commandant’s offices, like the settlers deported in February.

The night of 28 to 29 June

The deportation differed from the previous two. It took place mainly in towns, where most of the refugees were concentrated. NKVD operational groups, supported by the militia and local activists, took people from flats, lodging places and the streets, checking them against lists drawn up earlier. A dozen or so minutes or several hours were given to pack, and much depended on the attitude of the officers. Over several days the deportees were brought to stations where transports were formed, and some of them were told that they were finally going west, home. The trains, however, set off east. People who had accepted Soviet passports or taken jobs in Soviet institutions also ended up in the wagons, and even residents who were not refugees. According to Russian researchers the operation ended on 2 July.

The refugees travelled in covered freight wagons with plank beds, an iron stove and a hole in the floor in place of a latrine, several dozen to a wagon. In the February deportation the greatest danger had been the frost; in June and July it was the heat. In the closed wagons water and food were short, and the journey often lasted several weeks. From Białystok, as Aleksandr Gurianov of the Memorial Society established, five transports set out: three to Kotlas (PL), one to Arkhangelsk and one to Shabalino in the Kirov oblast.

How many were deported, and who

The figures differ depending on the source and the method of counting. According to tallies of the NKVD convoy troops, on which the Polish historian Daniel Boćkowski relied, 76,068 people were deported. According to NKVD reports cited in Russian literature, 76,382 people from 25,682 families were detained, including about 22,900 from the western oblasts of Belarus and about 53,500 from the western oblasts of Ukraine, and a final NKVD tally of July 1940, which also includes single persons, gives 90,511 resettled. The Institute of National Remembrance speaks of about 80,000, and some studies of almost 100,000. Polish estimates from wartime and the first postwar years, made without access to Soviet archives, gave from 220,000 to as many as 400,000 deported.

The national composition is also given differently. According to the IPN, Jews made up two thirds of those deported, according to Pyżewska about 84 per cent, and some Russian researchers give 82 to 90 per cent. The rest were Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians. The historian Alexander Statiev cites NKVD documents according to which in the spring of 1941 58,852 Jewish refugees from Poland were living in the special settlements. Among those deported were many members of the intelligentsia, doctors, teachers and scholars, as well as craftsmen, workers and small traders from the towns of western and central Poland. There were activists of Jewish political parties, and whole families travelled together with small children and the elderly.

In the north

The refugees were settled mainly in the Arkhangelsk (PL), Sverdlovsk (PL) and Novosibirsk oblasts, in the Komi Republic, in the Mari (PL) and Yakut (PL) republics and in the Altai Krai, with smaller groups also in the Vologda, Molotov, Irkutsk and other oblasts. They lived in special settlements, barracks in the taiga, without the right to leave. Some of the men deported without their families went straight to the labour camps of the Gulag.

Most worked felling timber, floating logs and making railway sleepers. City people, tailors, craftsmen, merchants and teachers, did not know this work and struggled to meet the quotas, and the bread ration depended on the work done. NKVD documents from the autumn of 1940, on which Russian researchers rely, describe hunger, overcrowded barracks, lice and outbreaks of epidemics, and blame local enterprises that had not prepared the settlements. They also record instances of antisemitism on the part of the administration and other exiles. According to partial NKVD data, by mid-1941 about 15,000 exiles from the February and June 1940 deportations had died. Children and the elderly died most often.

What came next

A year later the war changed the exiles’ position. After the German attack on the USSR, the government of Gen. Władysław Sikorski signed on 30 July 1941 an agreement with Moscow, and on 12 August the Soviet authorities proclaimed an “amnesty” for Polish citizens. Many of the refugees of 1940 then set off south, to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Some of the Jews tried to join the Polish army in the USSR of Gen. Władysław Anders, but met with obstacles, because the Soviet authorities claimed that Jews could not be treated as Polish citizens.

The June 1940 deportation also had an effect that nobody intended. The families who stayed at home under German occupation mostly perished in the Holocaust, as did many refugees who had escaped deportation in June 1940 and whom the Germans caught up with in 1941. Many of those exiled to the taiga survived. The Jews who survived the war deep inside the Soviet Union formed, after 1945, the largest group of surviving Polish Jews. This does not change the fact that the deportation was a repression aimed at people judged disloyal, and some of them paid for it with their lives.

The last, fourth deportation from the eastern lands came in the spring of 1941. In all, according to NKVD documents, about 320,000–340,000 Polish citizens were sent into the interior of the USSR in the four deportations of 1940–1941, of whom, according to estimates based on the same data, 70,000–80,000 were Jews.