Jan Józef Kasprzyk, head of Poland’s Office for War Veterans and Victims of Oppression, said during the ceremony on Tuesday that tens of thousands were murdered by Soviet secret police 83 years ago because they would not abandon their “love of freedom.”
He added that “Bolshevik Russia went out of its way to enslave” people and educate them “in the mold of the insane ideology of Marxism and Stalinism.”
At least 111,000 ethnic Poles were murdered in the former USSR as part of the so-called “Polish Operation” of the Soviet Union’s NKVD secret police in 1937 and 1938, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
It added that nearly 29,000 others were sent to labour camps, where most of them died of hunger, disease and exhaustion, and more than 100,000 were deported into the Soviet interior, mainly to Kazakhstan and Siberia.
The NKVD launched its "Polish Operation" on August 11, 1937, following an order issued by its head at the time, Nikolai Yezhov, according to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).
President Andrzej Duda said last year that the 1930s purge of ethnic Poles was “the worst genocidal act of Soviet state terror before World War II.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in 2018 that “the Polish Operation, approved by [Josef] Stalin and conducted by the NKVD, was one of the worst crimes against the Polish nation committed in the Soviet Union.”
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance said on Tuesday that the NKVD’s “Polish Operation” was “one of the greatest crimes of genocide” in the history of 20th-century Europe.
(gs/pk)
Source: IAR, TVP