Ch. 1
 

THE  FORGOTTEN  HOLOCAUST

We are, my children and I, the survivors of the forgotten communist holocaust perpetrated by the Soviet Union which was 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. Possession of a private camera would land you in jail accused as a spy. Every aspect of life of each human, his behaviour, his education (even music and art), his employment, property, accommodation and locality of domicile, was totally controlled by the state, KGB and their masters in the Kremlin.

In addition, the Soviets pursued against us the so called "cold war" by proxy at a number of countries. It was diverting attention from exposure of their atrocities in occupied European countries. They blackmailed the Western world with atomic weapons, obtained thanks to easily stolen secrets in our free, open world by communist agents and Soviet embassies. The West, always politically pragmatic, did its best not to antagonize the Soviets and ignored their crimes against humanity. The media were careful not to antagonize the communist sympathizers in the West, the labour and socialist parties, left-wing organizations, etc. They purposely publicized German inhumanity instead.

And at the present time, the exposed past criminal history of Communism is being played down. Their evil history is revised and misrepresented. 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".


 

1939-1940 alliance against Hitler :
gen. Sikorski (Poland), W. Churchill (PM of Britain), gen. De Gaulle (France)

Just before the war, in August 1939, the Soviet Union rejected an invitation from the Allies (Great Britain, France and Poland) to join their alliance against Hitler's continuing aggression in Europe.

Instead, the Soviet Union signed a Friendship Treaty with Germany, which included a secret agreement to divide Poland and Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. This Russian back-up gave Hitler free hand to start the Second
World War
.



SOVIET- NAZI  FRIENDSHIP : 1939-1941

Soon after, in September 1939, the Red Army, in support of Hitler's invasion of Poland from the west, which triggered the war with England, France, Australia and India, attacked Poland from the east. Two months later, the Russians also attacked Finland, and invaded Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Bessarabia (Rumania), now Moldova.


On 23 August 1939 in Moscow, in the presence of Stalin (in white), the Soviet Foreign minister Molotov signs a non-aggression pact between Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union, and an additional secret agreement regarding the attack on Poland and division of Central Europe. Behind him stands the German Foreign minister Ribbentrop.

Joachim Ribbentrop (with signed documents), Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow on 23 August 1939, all happy after signing the treaty dividing Poland. It was seven days before the outbreak of the war.



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

German outline map of pre-1939 Poland recording the Partition of Poland, agreed between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler on 28 September 1939 (28.IX.39), with signatures on the map of Stalin and German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. A thick black line marks agreed final border.


Commander of the Soviet NKVD (KGB) Brigade, Semyon Moiseyevich Krivoshein (on the right), together with German General Heinz Guderian, in the Polish town Brzesc (Brest) before the joint German and Red Army parade on 22 September 1939 to celebrate the occupation of Poland.



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.


Semyon Moiseyevich Krivoshein, the Commander of the Soviet NKVD Brigade, salutes to German General Heinz Guderian in the Polish town Brzesc (Brest) before the joint German and Red Army parade on 22 September 1939, to celebrate the occupation of 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 not as a World War Two but 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- part 1
Watch 10 min. trailer of a Latvian film made in 2008
Trailer has English narration and Latvian subtitles

The Soviet Story - part 2

 

 



 

AND NOWADAYS, AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION

And nowadays, after the collapse of former Bolshevik Russia, this Evil Empire which in 1939 assisted Hitler to start the War and stabbed Poland in the back — my home town Pinsk, our house with large garden grounds, as well as my grandfather's country home and landed estate, all robbed by the Soviet-Russian Imperialists, were not returned to Poland. One of newly created post-Soviet states, Belarus, has taken over our land and our properties. In Belarus, still in the year 2015, there is no democracy. The "reforms" didn't go very far. Under the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko, things remain there like they were very much in the Soviet Union.

Contacts with new bureaucracies of the former Soviet Union are not very easy. They have retained the communist old guard, soviet mentality and attitudes. Most of the post-Soviet republics are run by former communists. The old guard have never been punished for their crimes. There have been no trials, not even truth commissions or government inquiries and debates.

 

Vladimir Putin, a former lieutenant colonel who operated as a KGB spy in Dresden in the Soviet-occupied East Germany was elected the president of Russia. He muzzled, exiled or jailed the new Russian oligarchs and combined their holdings into huge state-run corporation to finance his dream of a new Soviet empire.

He salvaged the remnants of the Soviet Union including its political tactics of
threats and blackmail to the western countries, using lies and deception. He kept the Soviet national anthem, with the updated words by the same author. Under an excuse of following the American example of "war on terror" he bloodily subjugated Chechnia. Although he suffered a setback when his attempt to place Ukraine under direct Russian political control backfired as Ukrainian people took to the streets, launching the famous Orange revolution.

During his 8 years of presidency, press freedom has been intimidated. Twenty two (!) Russian reporters plus a number of political opponents, who have spoken out against Putin's administration, have been mysteriously murdered.

In 2008 he intervened militarily in Georgia, in 2014 he invaded and occupied Ukrainian Crimea and recently he invaded Easter Ukraine.


 
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