On Monday morning, President Andrzej Duda laid flowers at the Warsaw's Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East. The 17th of September marks the 79th anniversary of Soviet aggression against Poland.
The Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East located at the junction of Muranowska and Andersa streets shows a pile of religious symbols (Catholic and Orthodox crosses as well as Jewish and Muslim symbols) on a railway flatcar, which is set on tracks.Each railway sleeper displays the names of places from which Polish citizens were deported for use as slave labour in the USSR, and the names of the camps, collective farms, exile villages and various outposts of the gulag that were their destinations, including the mass murder sites used by the Soviet NKVD.
On the 17th of September, 1939 the Soviet Red Army crossed its western borders and invaded Polish territory, carrying out the provisions included in a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. As a result of the alliance between two totalitarian regimes, another partition of left-alone Poland had become reality.
The Soviet Union took control of a vast territory amounting to over 190.000 square kilometres, inhabited by some 13.000.000 people. The pared Vilnuis Region was ceremoniously given to Lithuania in October, 1939. Not for long, however, as by June, 1940, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were incorporated into the USSR. The exact number of Polish citizens who between 1939 and 1941 found themselves under Soviet occupation remains unknown.
Autor: gf / Źródło: TVN24 International, PAP