On September 17, 1939, the Red Army invaded Poland. This is the day the country lost its hard-won independence. The trauma of this event is still alive today, claims Bartosz Dudek for “Deutsche Welle”.
On the evening of September 17, 1939, Polish President Ignacy Mościcki and the entire government of the country crossed over to Romania, where they were interned. Thus, Poland, whose unity was restored only in 1918 after 123 years of division, ceased to exist as an independent state on that day. This brought back an old Polish trauma. Germany and Russia divided neighboring Poland - once again, and the dream of entire generations of Poles, who since 1795 have been fighting for their freedom in countless uprisings and battles, including under foreign flags, has been shattered once again.
Today we assume that the invasion of Poland and its division was foreshadowed by the Versailles system of peace treaties concluded after the end of World War II. Defeated and with huge reparations and painful territorial losses, Germany seeks revenge. The rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the creation of the USSR show that the Kremlin has not given up on expansion to the west.
With the division of Poland, Hitler and Stalin pursued a common goal: to stifle the Poles' desire for freedom for a long time to come, to terrorize and enslave the Polish people. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to eliminate the country's elite and establish a regime of terror in it. And so it happened: in 1940, the Third Reich created the Auschwitz concentration camp, which initially served as a camp for the extermination of the Polish elite and Soviet prisoners of war, and was later converted into a camp for the extermination of Jews from all over Europe.
Thousands of representatives of the Polish intelligentsia, clergy and aristocracy were murdered at this place. But not only there - in parallel, Stalin's executioners shot in the Katyn Forest, near Kharkov and the village of Mednoye a total of 22 thousand captured Polish officers, who were lawyers and teachers, scientists and entrepreneurs, and government officials by profession.
A similar fate befell hundreds of thousands of Poles from the eastern and western parts of the divided country - they were murdered, abducted or expelled - some to the Third Reich, others to Siberia and Kazakhstan. This was a catastrophe unprecedented in the country's history, and the losses were such that they would leave their mark decades after the war.
However, the Poles showed the strength of their spirit. They survived both World War II and the terror of the USSR.
The election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II marked the beginning of changes in the world and the return of the church to the lives of millions.
The creation of the Solidarity trade union in Poland destroyed the foundations of the communist regime in Eastern Europe.