History /
Poland before WWII or Poland now what would you choose? [390]
As to reality:
It is pity that many hands were left in our cemeteries.
UPA was active in the ethnic cleansing actions of ethnic Poles from areas of Ukrainian autonomous settlement through terrorist acts and the mass-murder of Polish civilians.[56] Ethnic cleansing operations against the Polish population began on a large scale in March 1943.[57]
Brutal methods such as beheading, disembowelling, and killing with knives and axes were employed against Poles. In addition to the UPA, Ukrainian peasants also participated in the violence,[58] and large groups of armed "bandit" marauders, unafiliated with UPA, brutalized civilians.[59] so the exact number of Poles killed specifically by UPA is unknown. The UPA also killed ethnic Ukrainians who were believed to be associated with communists, as well as those Ukrainians who had intermarried with Poles[citation needed]. In anti-Polish actions from Autumn 1943 in Halychyna, the UPA conducted cooperative actions with detachments from the Galician Division.[60] The estimates of the number of Poles murdered in Ukraine range from 100,000 (Edward Prus, 2006)[61] to 500,000 (Norman Davies, 1996);[3] many more Poles fled the area because of the post-war chaos.
Post WWII Gdańsk
After the final Soviet offensive began in January, 1945, hundreds of thousands of German refugees, many of whom had fled to Gdańsk on foot from East Prussia (see evacuation of East Prussia), tried to escape through the city's port in a large-scale evacuation involving hundreds of German cargo and passenger ships. Some of the ships were sunk by the Soviets, including the Wilhelm Gustloff after an evacuation was attempted at neighboring Gdynia. In the process, tens of thousands of refugees were killed.
An unspecified number of young (mostly underaged) inhabitanst of Gdańsk, both male and female, was rounded up by the Soviet NKVD in 1945 and placed in provisional camps in Grudziądz, Ciechanów, Działdowo and Iława. All of them were soon deported to Siberia by the Soviet secret police, as revealed by the Institute of National Remembrance in 2000-2002 investigation
I don't understand people from country which had nothing to say after WWII and durring WWII ... debating about this issues as if Poland had as much to say as for example Soviets...
Anny way Poland was one of the biggest vicitmes after WWII.
You can't deny that many Poles were happy to be offered full employment and some other things that communism brought.
Without Soviets Poland would never be communistic country. Communism was imposed on Poland by force.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_citizens_(19 39-1946)
In the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasion of Poland (September, 1939) the territory of Poland was divided between the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR).
Both powers were hostile to the Polish culture and the Polish people, aiming at their destruction.[1] Before Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union coordinated their Poland-related policies, most visibly in the four Gestapo-NKVD Conferences, where the occupants discussed plans for dealing with the Polish resistance movement and future destruction of Poland.[2]
There is some controversy as to whether Soviet policies were harsher than those of the Nazis.
In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported more than 1,200,000 Poles, most in four mass deportations. The first deportation took place February 10, 1940, with more than 220,000 sent to northern European Russia; the second on April 13, 1940, sending 320,000 primarily to Kazakhstan; a third wave in June-July 1940 totaled more than 240,000; the fourth occurred in June, 1941, deporting 300,000. It was determined based on Soviet information that more than 760,000 of the deportees had died-a large part of those dead being children, who had comprised about a third of deportees
