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Poland remembers victims of Soviet secret police 85 years on

11.08.2022 14:30
Tens of thousands of ethnic Poles killed in the former USSR in the late 1930s were remembered at a memorial ceremony in Warsaw on Thursday.
Memorial ceremonies at the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, in Warsaw on Thursday, August 11, 2022.
Memorial ceremonies at the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, in Warsaw on Thursday, August 11, 2022.Photo: PAP/Paweł Supernak

Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Gliński, who led the ceremony, honoured the victims by placing flowers at the Polish capital's Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, state broadcaster TVP Info reported.

Earlier in the day, those murdered by Soviet secret police decades ago were commemorated in the southern city of Kraków by the government-affiliated Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.

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, according to the IAR news agency.

It said 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" 85 years ago, on August 11, 1937, following an order issued by its head at the time, Nikolai Yezhov, according to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance.

President Andrzej Duda said a few years ago 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 has said 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.”

The Institute of National Remembrance has said that the NKVD’s “Polish Operation” was “one of the greatest crimes of genocide” in the history of 20th-century Europe.

(gs)

Source: IAR, PAP, TVP, niezalezna.pl