|
The Path of Anders' Army |
1941-1945 |
| The one and a half million citizens of Eastern Poland
deported to the Soviet Union were placed in a number of labor camps in
Siberia, Kazakhstan and Soviet Asia. Women and children were frequently
placed in special camps called posiolki. Men were frequently placed in
labor camps (mainly in lumber camps and mines) and performed slave labor at
high mortality rates. Most did not survive to tell their story. But on
June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In England, General
Sikorski called on the Soviet Union to cooperate with the Polish government
exiled in London. A stunned Stalin agreed and the Sikorski-Maisky Agreement
was signed on July 30, 1941, releasing the Poles to form an army. The
released prisoners were only told that the army was forming "somewhere in
the south." In a tragic exodus only approximately 115,000 men, women, and
children made it out of the Soviet Union.
Shown above is the cover of an identification card distributed to the soldiers of the II Polish Corps in 1946. The card shows the paths the soldiers took from various labor camps in the Soviet Union (mainly in Siberia). The soldiers converged to the army's first headquarters in Buzuluk, Russia (shown as a triangle in the upper-mid portion of the card) with subsequent movement to Tashkent, Uzbekistan (shown as a partially covered circle). The thick white line shows the army's path from Uzbekistan through Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and into Italy.
|