Название: The Augustow Roundup of July 1945: Accounts of the Brutal Soviet Repression of Polish Resistance
Автор: Teresa Kaczorowska, Bozena U. Zaremba
Издательство: McFarland & Company
Год: 2023
Страниц: 205
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: 11.4 MB

In 1945, remnants of the Polish Home Army re-formed to counter brutal Soviet repressions. In July of that year, more than 7,000 HA freedom fighters were arrested in the northeastern Augustow region and held in barns, pigsties and warehouses where they were beaten and tortured. Two thousand of them were never seen again--their whereabouts remain a mystery. Seventy-five years later, their relatives still search for answers and the location of their mass burial. This book examines the fateful events of the Augustow Roundup (a.k.a. "little Katyn") through eyewitness testimonies.

The goal of The Augustow Roundup of July 1945: Accounts of the Brutal Soviet Repression of Polish Resistance is to shed light on the Augustow Roundup—a barely known, still unsolved, yet most ruthless Stalinist crime in post–World War II Poland, which sometimes is also referred to as the “July Roundup,” “Little Katyn” or “Another Katyn.” It was carried out by regular troops of the Red Army and Internal Troops of the 62nd Division of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), aided by members of the UB (Polish secret police), MO (Citizens’ Militia), and 160 Polish soldiers of the First Infantry Regiment of the Praga District of Warsaw. These forces, numbering approximately 45,000 men, raided the Augustów Primeval Forest (located in the northeast region of Poland) and its surroundings to carry out an extensive pacification. Over 7,000 people suspected of involvement in the Polish ­Anti-Communist Resistance—the underground movement favoring independence from the Soviet Union—were imprisoned in dozens of places in Augustów, Suwałki, Sejny, and Sokółka counties. In barns, pigsties, warehouses, and sheds that belonged to local farmers, the Soviets created the ­so-called “filtration camps,” where the detainees were subjected to interrogation, beating, and torture—methods of cruelty and terror developed by the Stalinist apparatus. Sometimes, the captors restrained prisoners with barbed wire or kept them under the open sky in flooded pits.

Only some of those arrested during the Roundup returned to their homes. To this day, no one knows what happened to a large number of Poles who went missing without a trace—how and where they were murdered or where their bodies were buried. Until now, it has been assumed that the number of Augustow Roundup victims was 592. That figure agrees with the evaluation of the Bialystok branch of the IPN (National Remembrance Institute), which is conducting an investigation. However, in light of recent research, especially the release of some decoded cryptograms by Nikita Petrov of the Association “Memorial” in Moscow, the number of victims is now estimated at 2,000.