One of the basic instruments in the implementation of an anti-Polish nation policy was an unprecedented on such a scale forced displacement of population. In the case of Moscow, it was a reference to the tsarist policy of mixing the peoples of the empire. It has been systematically implemented since the days of Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1530–1584), and under Joseph Stalin’s rule, it has grown into the official ethnicity policy of the Soviet state. The extermination policy of the Soviet Union was aimed at full unification of the looted territories with the rest of the Soviet empire. It was realized through physical liquidation of Polish intelligentsia, officials of Polish state administration, police and army. Already on September 18th, right after the invasion of Poland, several thousand Poles were shot by Soviet soldiers and military police; without a trial. Forced deportations, public executions, mass murders and concentration camps are a common feature of both murderous systems: Nazism and Stalinism. Except for the gas chambers, all methods of destroying humans were already earlier applied in the East (since November 1917), and later in Nazi Germany (since January 1933). The only difference was that from June 22, 1941, Stalin was counting on emergence of a territorially unspecified Polish state, which Hitler had never planned. Poland as the only member of the Allied side in World War II was shifted territorial (and reduced by 100 thousand sq. Km compared to August 31, 1939) and forced to exchange population, and became a satellite of the Soviet Union for 45-year – all at the request of Moscow.

The text is a review of a collective work devoted, as the title indicates, to the extermination and suffering of Polish children during World War II. The content of the chapters focuses on the fate of Polish children in the General Government and East Prussia of the Third Reich as well as in the territory of Germany after 1945. The individual chapters contain documented crimes against Polish children not only in concentration camps but also in places of residence (Łódź, Zamojszczyzna, CONFIDENTIAL: FOR PEER REVIEW ONLY Białystok, and others). The book includes 12 chapters presenting the effects of the policy of the occupant towards the youngest generation in the period indicated by the caesura, and 2 chapters devoted to the fate of Polish children, who the end of the war found in Germany. The publication of this monograph in English enables the dissemination of knowledge about the fate of Polish children during World War II among a wide range of English-speaking readers. It also fosters reflection on the long-term consequences of wars and the paradox of the 20th century as the “Centenary of the Child” that was announced by Ellen Key

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Disputes Over the Attitude of Poles toward Jews

One of Hitler’s important goals, as stated in “Mein Kampf”, was the destruction of the Jews. He began implementing this plan with the outbreak of World War II. In the occupied Polish territories and as his conquests in subsequent European countries progressed, he ordered first the concentration of Jews in ghettos and their annihilation through progressive starvation, and from the spring of 1942 through their mass annihilation in special extermination camps. Those in Warsaw, Poland – they constituted some 3 million – in 1943 made a desperate attempt, with no real chance of success to resist, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This resulted in the destruction by arson of some 50,000 Jews who remained there. This event and its aftermath provoke passionate disputes as to whether Poles provided, and to what extent, assistance to the murdered Jews. This sketch will show the disputes, and within the Poles, waged on the 80th anniversary of these events related to this. This is the aftermath of contemporary Polish “historical politics”.