I have been thinking a lot about the widespread ignorance of Polish history in Britain and want to make a small reparation by publishing a potted history about one of the most shameful secrets of the British government during WW2 in the hope that some friends who are not members of the website of my ex-school friends will read it.  We all grew up in East Africa and had a long discussion about the topic. I refer to the glossing over  by the British Government of Stalin's forcible deportation policy in a pact signed in 1939 with Hitler concerning the Polish people.  (The reason was the British needed Stalin as an ally. ) Only the outbreak of war stopped what could have become the biggest genocide in European history.  Many of those Poles walked from various camps in Siberia and, I think Kazakstan, to India after the war and I met one of them in Uganda after I married, and I got to know her well.  Another attended the same boarding school as me in Tanganyika but I did not know her personally. 

Very briefly: After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 the Soviets broke diplomatic relations when they withdrew recognition of the Polish government at the start of the invasion.  Up to 1.5 million Polish citizens, including over 200,000 Polish prisoners of war, were deported from Soviet-occupied Poland by the NKVD to the Gulags.  

 Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations were re-established in 1941 after the German invasion of the  Union forced Joseph Stalin to look for allies.   The military agreement from August 14 and subsequent Sikorski-Mayski Agreement from August 17, 1941, was ended when Stalin agreed to declare all previous pacts he had with Nazi Germany null and void, to invalidate the September 1939 Soviet-German partition of Poland and to  release hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners-of-war held in Soviet camps.  Some of these Polish people were formed into an army that joined the British in Palestine, called the Anders Army.  Huge numbers of civilians died on the marches from Siberia to India, and because of the secrecy of the era we will never know exactly but some hundreds of thousands undoubtedly.  The gates of the camps were opened and they were told to leave, mostly starving and barefooted in Winter!  I shake my head when I recall what my friend experienced, including frequent rape.  Imagine being raped at fourteen years old because you stole a frozen beet to eat from a huge beet field, not having eaten a anything else for days.

 Their stories are heartbreaking.  What is more, they were sent third class to East Africa by the British once they reached India, and locked into squalid holding camps; their women were frequently forced to prostitute themselves for a little more food especially if they had children and a little extra clothing or shoes!  I felt ashamed to be British when my friend recounted some of their suffering in these camps - after all they had endured before, and just because they were Polish and considered a people of no-consequence to the Germans and Russians and evidently the British too who hid their history from the radio, newspapers and classrooms of Britain.  In the same way, to protect their ally Stalin, the British Government did not draw public attention to the genocide of millions of Ukrainians by the Soviets during the same era.

 Before Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union coordinated their Poland-related policies, most visibly in the four Gestapo-NKVD Conferences.  They discussed plans for dealing with the Polish resistance movement and the future destruction of Poland. 

 Both Germans and Soviets were equally hostile to the existence of an independent Poland, her culture and the Polish people, aiming at their total destruction.  This was genocide on a par with the Holocaust and it would console me if I could be told that the Jewish people also learn this history in their schools. I have the impression that they do not, because until earlier this year, 2013, I was unaware from my previous reading about WW2 of the vast scale of the plan to annihilate the Polish people whatever their religion and everything I read about the civilian suffering there has described only the targeting of Jews.  It was thanks to some recent hostility towards Polish immigrants reported in the British press, to which I objected on FB, that my memoriesof my Polish friend in Uganda were rekindled and I and some others looked into the subject.  This is where the Internet does some of what its founder intended, viz: the mass education of its users about stuff worth knowing. 

About 6 million Polish citizens (nearly 21.4% of Poland's population) died between 1939 and 1945 as a result of the occupation and about half of them were Jews. Over 90% of the death toll came through non-military losses, because most of the civilians were targeted by various actions of the Germans and the Soviets against Polish civil institutions and communities countrywide.