Stalin*s Ethnic Cleansing

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Throughout the bitterly cold early hours of Saturday 10th February 1940 thousands of Polish country folk were roused from sleep by the peremptory knocking of the Soviet Soldiers.
Under gunpoint entire families were hurried to waiting trains, crammed into cattle trucks and deported as disposable labour into the secret depths of Stalin's Russia.

Many were to perish, defeated by malnutrition, disease, the extremes of climate, and the rigid demands of the communist military regime.

A few – weak, drained and sick – miraculously emerged from years of this inhuman suffering and struggled to reshape their mangled lives but generally somewhere far from the land of their birth.

This book, published originally in Polish in 1996, is a collection of their stories told in their own words and now, as faithfully as possible to the writers' intentions, appears in English as a more generally available witness to their suffering and courage.

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Throughout the bitterly cold early hours of Saturday 10th February 1940 thousands of Polish country folk were roused from sleep by the peremptory knocking of the Soviet Soldiers. Under gunpoint entire families were hurried to waiting trains, crammed into cattle trucks and deported as disposable labour into the secret depths of Stalin's Russia. Many were to perish, defeated by malnutrition, disease, the extremes of climate, and the rigid demands of the communist military regime. A few – weak, drained and sick – miraculously emerged from years of this inhuman suffering and struggled to reshape their mangled lives but generally somewhere far from the land of their birth. This book, published originally in Polish in 1996, is a collection of their stories told in their own words and now, as faithfully as possible to the writers' intentions, appears in English as a more generally available witness to their suffering and courage.
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