{"id":313,"date":"2006-06-23T10:00:26","date_gmt":"2006-06-23T17:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/23\/a-forgotten-odyssey\/"},"modified":"2019-08-28T15:19:49","modified_gmt":"2019-08-28T22:19:49","slug":"a-forgotten-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/313","title":{"rendered":"A Forgotten Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

The documentary film, A Forgotten Odyssey<\/a>, describes the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939 and the consequences of that invasion.<\/p>\n

The truth is, the odyssey of the Polish people after the Soviet\u00c2\u00a0occupation was not forgotten .\u00a0 It was\u00c2\u00a0hushed up by the West.<\/p>\n

\"Crosses<\/a><\/p>\n

Warsaw Memorial to the Villages Overrun by the Soviets<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the Soviets rounded up the officers of the Polish military to be later executed in the Katyn Forest Massacre, 1.7 million Polish citizens including the families of the officers, shopkeepers, and even entire villages that resisted Soviet\u00c2\u00a0authority were herded onto cattle trains and sent to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and remote regions of Russia.<\/p>\n

The people\u00c2\u00a0were packed into train cars with a nothing but a cast iron stove in the middle of the car .\u00a0 Food and water were infrequently offered, and no lavatory facilities were available .\u00a0 To relieve their bladders and their bowels, they were provided only with a small hole in the floor of the train car.<\/p>\n

One survivor recalled that her grandmother became ill on the trip .\u00a0 No medical attention was provided and her grandmother died .\u00a0 Their captors tossed the body of her grandmother into a ditch and the train moved on.<\/p>\n

When the captives reached their various destinations, they were put to work at hard labor, still without adequate food, water, or medical care .\u00a0 In at least some cases, the captives had to\u00c2\u00a0kill wild animals on the steppes .\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0But in a hostile environment\u00c2\u00a0wild\u00c2\u00a0game was scarce;\u00c2\u00a0some of the captives\u00c2\u00a0were reduced to catching steppe rats for food .\u00a0 One\u00c2\u00a0man recalled that he was assigned to work in the bitter cold at night, and that to stay warm he would splash water on his clothes .\u00a0 The water would freeze almost immediately into a hard shell, and the icy shell helped keep him warm.<\/p>\n

After\u00c2\u00a0the Germans betrayed the Soviets and invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Britain convinced the Soviets to offer amnesty to the Poles and allow them to form a Polish Army to fight Hitler .\u00a0 The Soviets allowed a number of the Poles to travel to Iran where the Allied forces were moving war supplies to the Eastern Front .\u00a0 The difficult journey to Iran through inhospitable territory\u00c2\u00a0may have been\u00c2\u00a0the greatest trial the refugees\u00c2\u00a0had yet faced .\u00a0 By the time the Poles reached Iran, they were starving, but they were generously received and fed by the American and British soldiers there .\u00a0 They were not, however, allowed to speak of their treatment at the hands of the Soviets, lest they offend the Soviet Union, the new ally of America and Britain.<\/p>\n

\"Crosses<\/a><\/p>\n

On the Railroad Ties are the Names of the Villages Overrun by the Soviets<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many of the Polish refugees\u00c2\u00a0who reached Iran entered the military service to fight alongside the Allies, not realizing that the Allies had already agreed to turn the eastern half of Poland over to the Soviet Union .\u00a0 At the conclusion of the war, these soldiers found they had won the war, but had lost their home .\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Over 110,000\u00c2\u00a0of them and their families emigrated to England, and the rest relocated to other parts of the world .\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of the 1.7 million Poles sent to the work camps in the Soviet Union, only about 500,000 are known to have survived .\u00a0 Many of the survivors tried to forget these horrible years and later in life refused to talk about the experience at all .\u00a0 In all, over 6 million Poles died during World War II at the hands of the Germans or the Soviets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The documentary film, A Forgotten Odyssey, describes the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939 and the consequences of that invasion. The truth is, the odyssey of the Polish people after the Soviet\u00c2\u00a0occupation was not forgotten … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-journal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pyBfX-53","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21852,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions\/21852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendanko.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}