“I’ll tell you my story” — an unusual tour of the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Memory of Siberia took place on the eve of the 85th anniversary of the Soviet aggression against Poland and the World Prisoners of Siberia Day. Only once a year, prisoners of Soviet camps tell live stories of their hard lives to visitors.
Living witnesses of those events, such as Janina Rutkowska, have a lot to tell: “At first we settled in a former forge building where we slept on boards and straw. There was a stove in the middle of the Barracks, where everything was cooked.”
As Ewelina Kamienska, an employee of the Museum of Memory of Siberia, notes, the Soviet occupation broke the fate of hundreds of thousands of residents of the eastern regions of interwar Poland.
“It was a huge tragedy, people were stunned by this aggression, which greatly affected the fate of people. People were taken out, our museum tells us about it. We have to talk about it, participate in these events, remember it so that it never happens again,” she said.
The authorities of the Soviet Union continued the mass deportations that began on February 10, 1940, and in the following months: large-scale deportations were carried out on April 13, at the turn of June and July, and in May and June 1941.
According to Polish estimates, as a result of the deportations organized in 1940-1941, about a million civilians were sent to Siberian labor camps. Soviet documents say 320,000.
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