Posted on Mar 27, 2022
Reports of Russians deporting Ukrainians to camps troubles Stalin survivors
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They were children when the Russian soldiers came for them in the dead of winter 1940.
The armed men who barged into their homes and gave them a half-hour to get dressed and pack a bag were called Soviets back then. And in the early days of World War II, they rousted Poles from their homes in what is now western Ukraine and shipped them off to the gulags in Siberia.
For these survivors, reports that Ukrainians are now being deported to "filtration" camps deep inside Russia brought back painful memories of their own ordeals — mixed with deep sympathy for a new generation of victims.
“I was just 3-and-a-half when the Russians came for us in the middle of the night, but I can still remember the sound of them banging on the door with rifles and bayonets and yelling 'Out! Out!” Marie Wypijewski, 85, told NBC News. "They made my father stand with his face to the wall while my mother packed and dressed us in the warmest clothes she could find."
The armed men who barged into their homes and gave them a half-hour to get dressed and pack a bag were called Soviets back then. And in the early days of World War II, they rousted Poles from their homes in what is now western Ukraine and shipped them off to the gulags in Siberia.
For these survivors, reports that Ukrainians are now being deported to "filtration" camps deep inside Russia brought back painful memories of their own ordeals — mixed with deep sympathy for a new generation of victims.
“I was just 3-and-a-half when the Russians came for us in the middle of the night, but I can still remember the sound of them banging on the door with rifles and bayonets and yelling 'Out! Out!” Marie Wypijewski, 85, told NBC News. "They made my father stand with his face to the wall while my mother packed and dressed us in the warmest clothes she could find."
Reports of Russians deporting Ukrainians to camps troubles Stalin survivors
Posted from nbcnews.com
Russia
Ukraine
Posted 2 y ago
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On top of that, Stalin effectively practiced genocide when about 3.9 million people died of starvation. Stalin was desperate to establish his collective, proletarian socialist views in Ukraine which many of the farmers of Ukraine resisted
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They came for the Ukrainians. Who's next? The Poles again? Moldovans? Lithuanians? Jews? Christians? Muslims? This isn't about getting rid of the nazis in Ukraine. Anyone who thinks that is a blithering idiot. putin's plan is to reestablish the soviet union. He wants the communist bloc back under his control.
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PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."ore than a million Poles were sent by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to Siberia.
Wypijewski's husband, Dennis, 91, said they were branded "enemies of the state" simply for being Polish. His hand trembling with emotion, he said he was shocked that "history seems to be repeating itself."
"I admire the way the Ukrainians have resisted, they have been very courageous," he said. "I never thought we would see something like this happening again. People being thrown out of their homes, losing everything they worked for in one night. People being taken by trains to Russia."
"Serce mi sie kroi," he said in Polish, which means it breaks my heart.
Ukrainian ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova first sounded the alarm that as many as 400,000 civilians were being taken by force to Russia after Putin’s troops began laying siege on March 2 to the now-destroyed city of Mariupol.
Questioned about the “filtration” camp reports, the Russian Embassy in the United States denounced the Ukrainian claims as “lies” and has called the departure of more than 380,000 people from Ukraine to its territory "evacuations."
But Ambassador Bathsheba Nell Crocker, the U.S. representative to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva, wrote in a letter that they have “credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation.”...
..."ore than a million Poles were sent by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to Siberia.
Wypijewski's husband, Dennis, 91, said they were branded "enemies of the state" simply for being Polish. His hand trembling with emotion, he said he was shocked that "history seems to be repeating itself."
"I admire the way the Ukrainians have resisted, they have been very courageous," he said. "I never thought we would see something like this happening again. People being thrown out of their homes, losing everything they worked for in one night. People being taken by trains to Russia."
"Serce mi sie kroi," he said in Polish, which means it breaks my heart.
Ukrainian ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova first sounded the alarm that as many as 400,000 civilians were being taken by force to Russia after Putin’s troops began laying siege on March 2 to the now-destroyed city of Mariupol.
Questioned about the “filtration” camp reports, the Russian Embassy in the United States denounced the Ukrainian claims as “lies” and has called the departure of more than 380,000 people from Ukraine to its territory "evacuations."
But Ambassador Bathsheba Nell Crocker, the U.S. representative to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva, wrote in a letter that they have “credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation.”...
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