Today is the 89th anniversary of the head of the NKVD Nikolai Yezhov signing NKVD Order No. 00485 which became the start of the Polish Operation of the NKVD.
It was essentially an order to kill as many Poles in the Soviet Union as possible.
111,091 Poles were shot in the back of the head within a year while tens of thousands were sent to Gulags.
Arrests relied on superficial criteria. NKVD officers consulted local phone books) and similar lists to identify and detain people with Polish-sounding surnames (for example, those ending in “-ski” or “-wicz”).
In Leningrad, the NKVD reviewed local telephone books and arrested more than 7000 citizens with Polish-sounding names.
The vast majority of these “suspects” were shot within 10 days of their arrest.
Almost all those executed were men.
Their wives were typically dealt with under a related order (No. 00486 of August 15th 1937) and forcibly deported, often to Kazakhstan, for terms of roughly 5–10 years.
Children were frequently sent to orphanages or special institutions, where they were to be raised as Russians without a Polish identity, stripped of knowledge of their origins and language.
Family property was confiscated.
In total, around 150 000 Poles are believed to have been shot, perished in Gulags or starved to death in this Russian genocidal campaign over the course of 1937 and 1938
“I’m terrified. Neither the police nor the military protect me. The only thing that protects me is my dog, because that’s the only thing they’re afraid of.”
A resident of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, flooded by thousands of illegal migrants, said locals are afraid to leave their homes.