formed a university in Paris in December 1939; when France fell, they organized several higher learning institutions in Great Britain, including a medical academy at the University of Edinburgh, a Polish teachers’ college, a department of veterinary studies, a law school, a business school, a technical school, as well as a military school and an air force school. Polish soldiers and officers interned in neutral Switzerland at the beginning of the war enrolled in three Swiss universities and received more than 350 university diplomas and degrees between 1940 and 1945. The United States, Great Britain, and Switzerland became centers of research that gathered exiled scientists and intellectuals who desired to continue their scholarly work.30
To sum up, as a result of forced population movements from the lands of Nazi-occupied Poland, about 4 million Polish citizens were outside Polish borders at the end of the war. Ninety percent of them were slave laborers.31
Poles in the Soviet occupation zone did not fare much better than their counterparts in the Generalna Gubernia. In the fall of 1939 the Soviets captured more than one hundred ninety thousand Polish soldiers and lower-ranking officers and held them in camps located in Soviet territory. The prisoners were hungry, inadequately clad, overworked, and tortured. After mid-1940, they were gradually freed from the camps and transferred as civilians to perform heavy labor for the Soviet economy. About fifteen thousand Polish officers were placed in three camps in Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostaszków. Between April and June of 1940, the Soviet NKVD executed 14,552 of these officers, including 12 generals. The Germans discovered their mass graves in the Katyń Forest in 1943, but Soviet authorities denied any responsibility until 1990.32 About three hundred fifty thousand civilian Poles were incarcerated in Soviet prisons and penal camps, accused of activities against the Soviet Union. The death toll among these prisoners was extremely high; for example the death rate in some of the harshest prisons in Kolyma or Chukotka reached a full 90 percent.33
Helena Podkopacz and her family lived in western Ukraine. In June 1940 they were crowded into cattle cars and transported to Siberia under inhuman conditions. They were part of one of the major deportation waves in February, April, and June 1940 that decimated the Polish population of the eastern territories of prewar Poland. Estimates differ among authors trying to appraise the total of the deported population. The most commonly accepted figures indicate that between 1939 and 1941 the Soviets deported about 1.7 million Polish citizens. About 60 percent of those were ethnic Poles, 20 percent Jews, 15 percent Ukrainians and Russians, and about 4 percent Belorussians. More than 66 percent of those deported were male. Close to three hundred eighty thousand were children, and one hundred eighty-four thousand were more than fifty years old.34 Polish citizens, faced with brutal living and working conditions and inhuman treatment by Soviet camp officials, died of starvation, malnutrition, exposure, exhaustion, and epidemics. According to some conservative estimates, two out of every ten people deported lost their lives in Siberia.35
Olga Tubielewicz’s husband, Jan, worked as a postmaster in Telechany in the Pinsk region. The Tubielewicz family avoided deportation until early summer 1941. In June 1941 the NKVD burst into their house at night, arrested and took away Jan, and ordered Olga to pack some bare necessities for herself, her two children, and mother-in-law. “I, my husband’s elderly mother, and my children all went to our bedroom, knelt in front of the picture of the Virgin Mary of Perpetual Help, cried, and prayed. . . . After they took my husband, I could not move or pack anything,” recalled Olga. They spent the night in cattle cars in the train station. The next morning’s news electrified everyone: war between Germany and the Soviet Union had just broken out. Olga and the other deportees heard German planes circling over the station, which was a natural target for bombing. “If we die,” she thought, “at least it will be in our own land.” Despite the danger, the transport made it through to Siberia and to a work camp in the Altai Mountains, where the family was forced to perform slave labor in the forest.36
The outbreak of the German-Soviet war in June 1941 prevented the total annihilation of the deported Polish population. Entering the anti-Nazi coalition, on July 30, 1941, Stalin signed a Polish-Soviet treaty providing for the formation of the Polish Army in Russia and for the release of Polish citizens from labor camps, prisons, and exile.37 After the news was announced to the deportees, large groups of Poles began to travel toward the south, where General Władysław Anders was forming the Polish army and setting up assembly centers. Chaos and destruction accompanied their odyssey: the Polish government in London was unable to provide any substantial aid, and Soviet officials did nothing to facilitate their movements. Hunger, violence, cold, heat, disease, and exhaustion resulted in a rising death toll as Poles arrived in the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union.38 Conflicts about the organization and use of the Polish army as well as the tragic situation of the civilian population resulted in the decision to move all Poles out of the Soviet Union and into Iran. During two large-scale operations in March–April and August 1942, about one hundred fifteen thousand people—including forty thousand civilians, mainly women and children—were evacuated from the USSR.39
The evacuees stopped first in several refugee camps in Iran, including Tehran, Ahwaz, Ashabad, Isfahan, and other places. The Polish population was in urgent need of food and clothing, but especially medical attention. Most were exhausted after the strenuous trip from Siberia and years of malnutrition and mistreatment. Red Cross hospitals quickly filled to capacity with Polish children suffering from serious diseases. The surviving children entered a system of kindergartens and schools established by devoted Polish teachers and educators, themselves refugees from Siberia. Close to two thousand children joined Polish scouting groups organized in Iran. Adult refugees had to deal with grief, look for lost family members, and plan for the future. Prewar political activists recruited new members to their parties. Scientists established the Towarzystwo Studiów Irańskich (Association of Iranian Studies) that sponsored research into the biology, geography, and geology of the Middle East, published the scholarly journal Studia Irańskie (Iranian Studies), and in cooperation with the University of Tehran organized a popular lecture series.40
Great Britain accepted about six hundred fifty Polish orphan children and some of the teachers caring for them in a refugee camp in Balachadi, India. Despite the unstable military situation in 1942, more Poles were evacuated from the Soviet Union and arrived in refugee camps in Karachi. A year later, more than two thousand Polish orphans and mothers with children were placed in a camp in Malir. Valivade became home to about twenty-five hundred Polish refugees, some of them from camps in Iran.41
The largest number of Polish refugee camps serving the Siberian deportees was located in the eastern part of Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, South Africa, South and North Rhodesia. Between 1942 and mid-1944, East Africa hosted more than thirteen thousand Polish refugees, who, like their compatriots in India, formed schools, churches, hospitals, and cultural organizations. Stefan Remiarz, for example, was only three years old when the war broke out in 1939. His entire family was deported from the Wilno area to Siberia. After his father and older brothers joined the Anders Army, Stefan and his mother were placed in refugee camps in Tanganyika, where they remained until 1948. Stefan remembers fondly his African experience, despite primitive living conditions in small huts made of clay and straw, without running water, electricity, or windows. He received excellent care and education in a Polish school, where nuns working as teachers drilled the children in Polish grammar and literature.42 Several hundred more Polish children arrived in Pahiatua, New Zealand in 1944, where they enjoyed hospitality of the New Zealand government. There were also Polish children and women living in a large camp in Santa Rosa, Mexico, near León.
After experiencing life under Soviet communism firsthand, not many of these refugees returned to Poland after the war. Some of them remained in their countries of first resettlement; others were offered refuge in Great Britain and its dominions, Canada and Australia; and residents of the Santa Rosa camp as well as Polish orphans from India and Africa were directly admitted to the United States. Many other refugees eventually arrived in America, emigrating from other countries as the opportunity arose. Helena Podkopacz, for example, after the loss of one son to disease during the
