Over 111,000 Poles murdered during the so-called Polish operation conducted by the Soviet NKVD in the years 1937-1938 were commemorated at the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East in Warsaw on Saturday.
The so-called 'Polish operation' was launched by Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, on August 11, 1937, to "completely destroy Polish spy networks." Some 140,000 people were arrested, 111,091 of them were sentenced to death. Most victims were Polish diaspora activists, clerks, teachers, priests, rich farmers, and craftsmen. According to some historians, this genocide could have claimed as many as 200,000 Polish lives but the exact number remains unknown.
"Today, we are paying tribute to over 100,000 of our compatriots brutally murdered only because they were speaking Polish, were faithful to the Christian faith, and - despite living beyond the borders of the Republic of Poland - were deeply rooted in the values building the Polish nation," Jan Józef Kasprzyk, the head of the Office for War Veterans, said during the ceremony.
Kasprzyk stressed that communism, of which Poles living in the USSR fell victim, was one of the most criminal ideologies in the history of mankind. "This ideology was built on hatred, and this hatred led to the crime whose victims we are honouring today," Kasprzyk stressed, adding that the death of Poles in 1937-1938 and the Katyń crime in 1940 was "the revenge of the Soviets for the Polish victory in the Battle of Warsaw in 1920."
In a letter read out during the ceremony, President Andrzej Duda wrote that the world knew these events as the time of Stalin's Great Terror (Great Purge - PAP) "but for us this was, above all, ethnic cleansing, a mass-scale murder of one's own citizens, killed only because they were Polish. This was a terrible manifestation of hatred and brutality experienced by our nation in those times."
The president stressed that nothing could justify genocide. "The state which kills its own citizens and deprives them of all rights, cannot count on recognition and respect," he underlined.
PM Mateusz Morawiecki wrote that "Poles have to remember this crime, fully explain it and make the knowledge about it generally known."
"The Polish Operation, approved by Stalin and conducted by the NKVD, was one of the biggest crimes committed against the Polish nation in the Soviet Union," Morawiecki wrote, adding that it had never been fully explained.
"Today's observances are a sign of our remembrance," Morawiecki declared.
Autor: gf / Źródło: TVN24 International, PAP
Źródło zdjęcia głównego: PAP | Rafał Guz