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Background to World War IIPoland

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Poland

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The Polish Corridor•What are the advantages of Poland’s location?

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The Polish Corridor• The Polish Corridor was the name given to a strip of territory

which was transferred from Germany to Poland by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The transfer of this territory was said to be justified on three grounds:

• Historical. The area of the Corridor had been part of the Kingdom of Poland from the tenth century to fourteenth century and from 1453/66 to 1772, when it annexed by Prussia during the first partition of Poland.

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• Ethnographic. The majority population of the region was either Polish (in the area on the west bank of the Vistula, between Gdańsk (Danzig) and Bydgoszcz (Bromberg)), or Kashubian (a people closely related to the Poles, generally considering themselves Poles as well) in the coastal area north-west of Danzig.

• Economic and political. The Poles argued that if the newly independent Polish state did not have an outlet to the Baltic Sea, it would be economically and therefore politically dependent on Germany. Since Britain and France wanted a strong Polish state as a counter-weight to Germany, they accepted this argument.

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• World War II was a complex war with many different issues and countries involved. What is relevant to ‘Krystyna’s Story’ is the European part of the war.

• Germany was left crushed after WWI; their defeat was humiliating and they were forced to pay reparation to the victors, which left them very poor. Adolf Hitler was a strong man who the people believed would help rebuild their country, and thus he gained both popularity and power.

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• In 1939 Germany demanded the Gdansk and the Polish Corridor but Poland refused. Hitler and Stalin (both dictators) made the decision to invade Poland and to partition it between them.

• On September 1 1939, the Germans invaded from the West and the Soviets from the East. Many of the Poles were transported to Siberia where they were forced to work for ‘Father Stalin’.

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• From September 1939, when the Soviet hordes treacherously invaded and subsequently occupied half of Poland's territory, to 1941, when they were shamefully defeated by Nazi Germany, the Soviets incarcerated and ruthlessly deported to uninhabitable parts of Soviet Russia nearly 2 000 000 Polish citizens including newborn babies, children, women and the elderly. All branded as "enemies of the working classes", "enemies of communism", "enemies of the Soviet Union"...

• Within few years almost 700 000 of those "enemies" perished - tortured to death in prisons, mass-executed or worked to death in forced labour concentration camps. Freezing cold, starvation and rampant epidemics were on the Soviet side in carrying out the plan of ruthless extermination.

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• In 1941 the Soviets, pressed by Hitler to the point of total military annihilation and begging desperately for help from the Allies, were forced to bend - they agreed to release all imprisoned and deported Polish citizens and to help organize, on the Soviet territory, a Polish Army under the command of the exiled Polish Government residing in London. However, the Soviets did not intend to meet their obligations and once dragged out of military misery they began to ignore previous agreements. Thousands of available conscripts never reached the recruitment centres of the Polish Army and only a small fraction of the Polish civilian population was allowed to leave the Soviet "paradise" along with the army. Eventually, out of close to 2 mln deported, only approximately 115 000 were freed by the Soviets in 1942 and about 250 000 "repatriated" in 1945-1947.

• More than a million Poles were forced to remain in the Evil Empire - most of them forever.

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• It is estimated that by the end of WWII 6.6 million Polish people had died: 600 000 military members and 6 million civilians. Many people lost their entire families and many children were sent to other countries to start new lives so they also lost their sense of self; their ‘Polishness’. Halina Ogonowska-Coates’ mother was one of these children, and Krystyna’s Story is a melding of the experiences of many Polish people. As a result it is a combination of fact and fiction; thus can be called a ‘novel’.