On September 17, 1939 the Red Army invaded Poland . This is the day the country loses its long-suffering independence. The trauma of this event is still alive today, claims Bartosz Dudek for “Deutsche Welle”.
Even on the evening of September 17, 1939, the Polish president Ignacy Mościcki and the entire government of the country went to Romania, where they were interned. Thus Poland, whose unity was restored only in 1918 after 123 years of division, on that day ceased to exist as an independent state. This brings back an old Polish trauma. Germany and Russia share 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 again.
Today we accept that the invasion of Poland and its partition 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 strives for revenge. The rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the creation of the USSR show that the Kremlin did not give up on westward expansion.
With the partition 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. In order 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 established the Auschwitz concentration camp, which originally served as an extermination camp for 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 killed in this place. But not only there - at the same time, Stalin's executioners shot a total of 22 thousand captured Polish officers, who were lawyers and teachers, scientists and entrepreneurs, government officials, in the Katyn Forest, near Kharkiv and the village of Mednoye.
Similar is the fate of hundreds of thousands of Poles from the eastern and western parts of the divided country - they were massacred, kidnapped or exiled - some in the Third Reich, others in Siberia and Kazakhstan. It is a catastrophe never seen before in the country's history, and the losses are such that they leave traces decades after the end of the war.
However, the Poles show the strength of their spirit. He survived both World War II and the terror of the USSR.
The election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II marks 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.