Acts of escape to the East in 1939
Acts of escape to the East in 1939: Since the German attack on Poland on 1st September 1939 defections of Poles started from areas directly threatened with invasion to lands in the east which seemed safer. When after the aggression of Soviets (17th September) Poland was divided into the territory of Soviet and German occupation: in the Soviet area there were hundred thousands of refugees from the central and western part of Poland. New refugees were coming too, who often had to wait whole weeks in order to cross the borders. Among the German occupation refugees were mainly Jews. The status of refugees was different from the local people’s: they were treated as an unstable and unsure element. During the “passportisation” action (granting new citizens of the Soviet Union – former Polish citizens – passports, new IDs) in spring 1940 the refugees were granted documents with an annotation that they could not inhabit one hundred kilometers-wide borderland. At the end of June 1940 the Soviet authorities organized a great deportation, in the course of which eighty-two thousand of refugees were taken away to the heart of the Soviet Union: mainly to the Novosibirsk and Arhangelsk Oblast. 84% of the deportees were Jews, 11% - Poles. The deportees were directed to heavy physical work. Paradoxically, for Jews the transportation turned out to be a salvation: one year later the area was occupied by Germans and those Jews who stayed there were killed in the Holocaust.