Workers constructing the Kolyma highway. While the nationality of these men is unknown, they very well could have been Polish deportees. Wikipedia photo.

In 1940 and 1941, more than 1.2 million Poles were forcibly deported from Poland to remote areas of the Soviet Union. Those deportations began in earnest 75 years ago today, when more than 220,000 Poles, mostly women and children, were rounded up and sent to northern European Russia. While the USSR never declared war on Poland, at the time of the Nazi invasion, the German-Soviet nonagression pact was still in place. When the invasion began, the Soviets stopped recognizing Polish sovereignty, and started simply dividing up Poland with the Germans.

Many Poles were simply killed, but at least a million were deported, and hundreds of thousands of those deported died. Many of those deported worked on the construction of the Kolyma Highway which extends 1262 miles from Nizhny Bestyakh to Magadan. The road is known as the “Road of Bones,” as most of the thousands of workers who died during its construction are interred within the roadway itself.

The deportations began 75 years ago today.

References

• Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum
• Wikipedia, Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–46)
• Exiled to Siberia: A Polish Child’s WWII Journey
• Maria Zak’s account

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