Highlights

Highlights, Women

Polish Gulag woman-prisoner befriended by John Paul II

By Ted Lipien In my book, Wojtyła’s Women: How They Shaped the life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church, I describe how future Pope John Paul II, whom I had interviewed in Washington D.C. for the Voice of America (VOA) in 1976 when he was Kraków’s Archbishop, became familiar with many stories of immense suffering of…

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Highlights, Voice of America

Petition for asylum for Polish refugee children introduced in the U.S. Senate in 1943

Throughout World War II, the arrests and forced deportations of Polish families to labor camps ordered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin received practically no mainstream media coverage in the United States. After the Soviet Union became an important military ally against Nazi Germany with the sudden collapse of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler following the German attack on Russia in June…

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Highlights

The Light of the Candle

Following the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, which started World War II, the Soviets began the first mass deportation of Poles on February 10, 1940 from the occupied eastern part of Poland. Whole families were arrested, usually early in the morning, and sent in overcrowded cattle train wagons to forced labor…

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Highlights

A poem about Wojtek the Soldier Bear

Wojtek can you hear me? By Anne Kaczanowski Wojtek can you hear me?   Wojtek do you still remember me?   Wojtek czy pamietasz? Wojtek czy jeszcze pamietasz mnie?   The penetrating sound of friends transcend the pages of time   And the bear turns his ear as the bell of the universe chimes   He remembers as though it…

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Highlights, Voice of America, Women

Polish women slave laborers in Soviet Russia

U.S. Government Propaganda Photo, 1943 By Ted Lipien A U.S. Government propaganda photo showing an unidentified Polish woman and other Polish women making their own clothing at a Red Cross refugee camp in Iran was taken by the Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in 1943. A few months earlier, the women were prisoners and slave laborers in the Soviet…

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Highlights

How U.S. Lied About Polish Refugee Children to Protect Stalin

How the Roosevelt Administration Shipped Polish Refugee Orphans to Mexico In Locked Trains and Lied About It to Protect Stalin The Untold Story of Polish Refugee Children from Soviet Russia: “A Group Lost in History” The current crisis at the U.S. southern border and the Trump administration’s efforts to keep migrants in Mexico, some of them children, while their asylum…

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Highlights, Iran

Polish refugee families in Iran

This U.S. Government propaganda photo showing Polish refugee families awaiting evacuation was taken by the Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran in 1943. To protect Stalin and the anti-Germany military alliance with Moscow, pro-Soviet propagandists in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration did not publish photos of Polish children who were starved, ill and near death when they were…

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Children, Highlights, Iran

U.S. Army officer on Polish children in Russian captivity

By Ted Lipien Lieutenant Colonel Henry I. Szymanski was a U.S. Army Liaison Officer to the Polish Army created under the command of General Władysław Anders during the Second World War II which fought the Germans alongside American and British troops in North Africa and Italy. On November 22, 1942, Lt. Col. Szymanski sent a report on Polish-Russian relations to…

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Highlights

Polish women enslaved in Soviet Russia

U.S. Government Propaganda Photo This U.S. Government propaganda photo showing an unidentified Polish woman with two children at a refugee camp in Iran was taken by the Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran in 1943. By that time, this woman was safe and both of her children looked healthy and no longer starved. For several months with thousands…

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