Polish prisoners of war taken by the Russian in 1939 were
divided into two groups: approximately 15,000 officers and policemen, who
were sent to three camps - Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszkow; and 190,000
privates, and non-commissioned officers, who were distributed throughout
the vast Gulag system
Also, in an effort to destroy Polish presence in eastern Poland, which was
annexed by the Soviets on the strength of the Ribbentrop-Molotow pact of
1939, entire Polish families were expropriated and deported in 1940 and
1941 from these territories to Siberia and Kazachstan. The deportees often
belonged to the more educated class, or were those who owned houses and
land. Commonly, men were arrested first and deported separately. Women and
children were deported later and to a different part of the vast Gulag network,
so that husbands and wives did not know where their spouses were exiled.
Mortality, especially among children during the deportations and after,
was extremely high.
On June 22, 1941, employing the Blitzkrieg strategy, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and German armies moved deep into Soviet territory. Under pressure from victorious Germans and the British promising aid, on July 30, 1941, Stalin signed an agreement with the Polish Government in Exile in London. This agreement, among other provisions, stipulated mutual aid in the war against Hitler, "amnesty for Polish citizens deprived of freedom on the Soviet territory," and the formation of a Polish army under a commander appointed by the Polish Government in London. Polish General Władysław Anders, released from the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) prison in Moscow, was nominated to that post. In response to the agreement, freed Polish Gulag prisoners began a trek across Russia to the assembly point of Buzuluk near Kuibyshev. Their journeys took weeks, even months to complete and involved spending nights on stations in hungry cities, waiting days at a time for erratically running trains. Many of these former prisoners, weakened by their Gulag existence, died from dysentery, typhus, exhaustion or starvation during their journeys or upon arrival. However, the number of officers arriving in Buzuluk was much smaller than expected. Stalin, when asked about this, replied that the officers had escaped to... Manchuria.
By the middle of March 1942, about seventy thousand Polish ex-prisoners of war assembled at Buzuluk. But the Poles received rations for only forty thousand, and the freed prisoners were dying fast, housed in tents in -50°F temperatures. Most importantly, they had received hardly any weapons from the Russians. Therefore, during negotiations with Stalin, General Anders succeeded in obtaining his agreement for the evacuation of the Polish army to Persia (now Iran), where they would be supplied and equipped by the British. The evacuation took place in two phases: one in April, and the other in August 1942. Altogether, about 113,000 people were evacuated, including women and children (mostly orphans). This was only a small fraction of the 1,500,000 Polish prisoners of war, deportees and Gulag inmates taken by the Soviets between 1939 and 1941. Most of them never saw Poland again.
After arrival in Persia, the army was moved to Iraq where it was equipped by the British and reorganized. After the French surrender in 1940, the Carpathian Brigade moved from Syria to Palestine, then defended Tobruk and joined the Polish army in Iraq to form the 2ND Polish Corps. The women and children, families of the military who came out of the Soviet hell, were transferred by the British to special camps in India and central Africa where they could recuperate. They had survived the war in safety.
On April 13, 1943, Berlin radio announced that in the village of Katyn, in the vicinity of Smolensk, Russia, the Germans had discovered mass graves of Polish officers. The Soviets announced that the Germans performed the killings in 1941 when invading the Soviet Union, and the Germans placed the blame on the Soviets.
