Here I am taking up where I left off yesterday, posting Professor Kopanski's essay on life in the Gulags.
If anybody thinks that Auschwitz and the Gulags were "comparable", I want to pose this question:
"How many Gulag survivors do you know who go around building museums and memorials at taxpayers expense, shake down entire nations for "reparations" and "protection" money, and put you in prison for questioning their self-serving interests?"
Six thousand Polish captives from Ostashkov and Starobielsk were transported to the Ukrainian town of Dergachi near Kharkov and executed in a similar way as in Katyn. Others were relocated to the coast of White Sea, placed on board (of) two vessels and sunk in the icy waters.
The mass executions of the Polish captives were organized by Y. Raichman, a commissar of NKVD under direct commands of Lavrentyi Beria.
But the most savage death toll came later, in slave camps of Kolyma and Uzbekistan, where inmates, women, men and children never survived longer than two years. 7
In the Kolyma gold mines, the annual death rate of Polish slaves alone rose to more than 50 percent in 1940. After 8 hours of inhumanly hard work, they received a bowl of potato soup and a slice of frozen black bread. My relative survived the Siberian death camp because he ate raw dead owls and small rodents. In the death and labor camps of Kolyma more than 3 million prisoners died between 1935 and 1955.
Polish, German, Rumanian and Finnish war prisoners who worked in the gold fields were the third generation of Soviet slaves. Working bulldozers sometimes excavated a huge mass grave and scraped up these stiffened bodies, thousands of bodies, thousands of skeletal corpses, twisted fingers, putrefying toes, frozen stumps . . .
Prisoners and slaves of the Vorkuta and Pechora camps who worked in temperature below zero, coerced by the desperate instinct of survival ate their own vomit and even flesh of killed fellow prisoners. They were too weak to escape or to resist.
One Polish survivor described the human phantoms of Kolyma camps: It was a procession not of human beings, but of corpses and trunks. The majority had neither noses, lips or ears. Female slaves in the Gulag were constantly raped by the camp guards who infected them with syphilis.
The cheapest and the most efficient Soviet weapons of mass killing were frost, starvation and exhaustion by hard labor.
After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Red Army committed several horrifying war crimes in the city of Lviv (Lwow, Lvov, Lemberg, Leopolis). But Rockwell Kent, an American tourist and "humanist", who was in the eastern Poland (western Ukraine) during the Soviet attack, greeted the Red Army.
The Soviet invaders who now liberated Ukraine from the yoke of Polish landlords, installed their own Bolshevist dictatorship in the formerly Polish - occupied ziemie. To protect the Red Ukraine against the Ukrainian and Polish reactionaries, the Soviet commissars converted the old Catholic convent of the St. Brigide Order into one of the worst prisons in the eastern Europe, where thousands of Ukrainian and Polish patriots were tortured to death by NKVD-men.
When the German army entered Lviv in June 29, 1941, they found in every cell of Brigidki jail a layer of a viscous mass. Dead bodies were stacked four or five (feet?) deep on the cell floors. The Soviet policemen murdered about 3,500 prisoners before their retreat.
A Polish woman who visited the prison on June 30 reported:
I saw a table in a room covered with many corpses that had been beaten to a pulp. One dead man was seated in a chair with a bayonet sticking out of his mouth. I saw the dead body of a small girl aged about eight years, hanging from the ceiling lamp.
Another Polish witness saw more savage examples of the Soviet purge:
Among other bodies, I saw a female corpse, one of whose breasts had been cut off, whilst the other was deeply lacerated. Another woman's abdomen had been cut open; she had been pregnant. From the open wound, the head of an unborn child stuck out.
All the teeth had been broken from the mouth of a male corpse. A small girl was dressed on the upper part of her body, whilst the lower part was naked and smeared all over with blood, especially near her private parts.
Nikita S. Khrushchev, the chief of the Ukrainian Communist Party, had ordered mass murdering of all suspected Quislings, Petains and other potential opponents of the Soviet regime. At Vinnitza, the German army discovered other Soviet killing fields and the mass graves of executed enemies of scientific socialism. In 1943, a team of Wehrmacht investigators uncovered nearly 10,000 corpses of Ukrainian victims of the Great Terror. The Germans published a photocopy of the report with the terrifying photographs.
Commissar Rapaport, known as The Beast, a supervisor of the mass killing of Ukrainians in Vinnitza and the man known even among his cruel henchmen as a sadistic psychopath, personally shot several prisoners.
In 1944, Stalin told the Polish premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk that he had liquidated 20,000 Ukrainian nationalists and conscripted another 200,000 suspected Ukrainian enemies of the Soviet Union into the Red Army. 15
After the stunning victories of the Germans and massacres of the prisoners by Beria's executioners, in several Siberian labor camps the Soviet slaves rose up against their opressors. In 1942, the slave uprising broke out in Ust- Usalpechora and Vologda Gulag camps. Polish prisoners of Vorkuta were astonished by the fact that millions of Soviet slaves prayed for liberation by the armies of Hitler.
The German army planned to liberate many Soviet concentration camps and Hitler considered to dispatch a special airborne commandos of Russian volunteers commanded by the Baltic German Russian-speaking SS officers for liberation of 20,000 Soviet slaves, but the war misfortunes of Wehrmacht and the Russo-Anglo-American counteroffensives thwarted the plan.
In June 16, 1940, a day after a Soviet ultimatum was handed to the Lithuanian government, 300,000 Russian troops invaded that tiny Baltic republic. Stalin and Molotov in their caveating note demanded free movement of their army in Lithuania, the installation of communist ministers and trial of two Lithuanian army officers who offended the Soviet Union. After the conquest of Lithuania, the Soviet army invaded next day a second small Baltic nation, Latvia. In June 17, the Soviet soldiers entered the Latvian capital of Riga.
On June 18, the Red Army occupied the third Baltic republic of Estonia.
One month later, the microscopic communist parties of the occupied Baltic republics "won" 92.8, 97.19 and 99.19 percent of votes in "spontaneous" elections, and established their regimes which immediately declared the Baltic republics as integral parts of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Dekanozov, Andrei Vishinsky and Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet prosecutors, were appointed as the supreme commissars of the Socialist Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Within one year of Soviet occupation more than two percent of the Baltic population was executed.
The inhumanity of the Soviet purges were comparable to (the purges) Byelorussia and Ukraine, available (sic) when the German armies evicted the Soviet forces in June 1941. Juozas Viktoravicius, a Lithuanian survivor of the tortures in the Forest of Death at Petrosiunai, four miles outside Kaunas, describes his experiences:
I was beaten 45 hours without stopping, they bound my hands and feet and put me into cold water. Others had their testicles kicked to pulp, were seated on red-hot stoves (called in Russian: tiepelushka), had needles rammed under their fingernails, were scalped, had their jaws ripped down to their necks, and their eyes gouged and their tongues torn out. At Kretinga, victims were bound to trees with iron hoops before being burned alive. In order to avoid the sound of shot in Kaunas prison, the commandant of the jail had instructed his executioners to kill each victim by bashing in his temples with a hammer.
Eight months before the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states, during the invasion of Poland in October 11, 1939, the commissar-general of NKVD, comrade Ivan A. Serov, signed top secret order No. 1223: the plan of Expulsion (Vivod) of the anti-Soviet elements from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In this document, which was found by the German soldiers in the NKVD office at Valka in July 1941, Serov described in detail the method of the ethnic cleansing in the Baltic lands. Those arrested at dawn would be transported in trucks so family would be segregated; children, women and men would be loaded into the separate cars.
Serov's order did not specify the places of banishment.
Footnotes:
1. Q.Reynold, The Stars are Neutral, London 1942, p. 97.
2. E. Buca, Vorkuta, London 1976, pp. 142-144, L. Tolstoy, Stalin's Secret War, London: Cape, 1981, p. 242.
3. R. Conquest, :Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camp, London 1978, p. 34. J. Lukacs, The Last European War: September 1939 - December
1941, London 1976, p. 89. L. FitzGibbon, Katyn: A Crime Without Parallel, London 1971, pp. 30-51.
4. L. Tolstoy, op. cit., p. 183.
5. M. Graczyk, Upiorny las (Haunted Wood), Katyn, Wprost, June 4, 1995, pp. 26-28.
6. J. Czapski, The Inhuman Land, London 1951, p. 35.
7. A. Ekart, Vanished Without Trace: The Story of Seven Years in Soviet Russia London 1954, p.11.
8. L. Tolstoy, op.cit., p.16.
9. A. Priess, Verbannung nach Sibiren Manitoba 1972, pp.55.
10. D. Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightement London 1973, p. 186.
11. L. Tolstoy, op. cit., p. 246.
12. Ibid., p. 247.
13. Ibid., p. 247.
14. Amtlisches Material zum Massenmord in Winnitza, Leipzig 1943, passim. Also: M. Seleshko, Vinnytzia - The Katyn of Ukraine. A Report by an Eyewitness, The Journal of Historical Review, 1980, no. 1, p. 344.
15. S. Mikolajczyk The Pattern of Soviet Domination, London 1948, p.111.
16. A. K. Herling The Soviet Slave Empire, New York 1951, p. 175.
17. W. Schellenberg, The Schellenberg Memoirs, London 1956, p.314.
18. Pelekis, Genocide: Lithuania's Threefold Tragedy Munich 1949, pp45-55.
19. These Names Accuse: Nominal List of Latvians Deported to Soviet Russsia in 1940-1941, Stockholm 1951, p. 15.
Dr. Ataullah Bogdan Kopanski is a professor at the International Islamic University in Selangor, Malaysia.
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Thought for the Day:
Sherlock Holmes would be proud. Reinhard Szibor of the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, and his colleagues suggest that pollen may offer a clue to a gruesome murder mystery.
In 1994, a grave with 32 skeletons was found in Magdeburg. One theory holds that the Gestapo performed a mass execution in the spring of 1945 as World War II ended. A second theory proposes that the Soviet secret police killed Soviet soldiers in the summer of 1953 for refusing to put down a German revolt.
In the October 1 Nature, Sziben species found in the skulls' nasal cavities best match those of summer-blooming plants, which implicates the Soviet secret police as the murderers.
(Source: Pollen for the Prosecution? In Science News, Vol 154, Nov 14, 1998) --