Soviet Records and Testimonies Document Poland’s Wartime Deportations

Norman Naimark presents the Hoover Institution Library and Archives’ Polish wartime holdings as evidence of Soviet mass deportation seen from two angles: the firsthand accounts of people seized from eastern Poland, and the identity papers later used by some deportees to leave the Soviet Union. The collection he describes includes roughly 20,000 testimonies, depositions, and questionnaire responses, alongside about 10,000 Soviet identity certificates.

Naimark calls the testimonies and related records “the jewel in the crown” of the London government collection because they show what deportation meant for Polish men, women, and children. Their value, in his account, lies in immediacy: they document people being dragged from homes in the middle of the night, given little time to pack, forced into trains, transported for weeks, and then made to live and work under Gulag conditions.

The setting is eastern Poland in 1939. A Chicago Sunday Tribune front page shown on screen carried the headline “REDS INVADE POLAND” and reported that Russians had crossed the border to “PROTECT MINORITIES.” A map placed Poland in October 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet-occupied east, the Red Army and the NKVD — the Soviet secret police — “arrested, seized, and deported many hundreds of thousands of Poles,” sending them in boxcars and freight cars deep into the Soviet Union.

Photographs in the source show civilians at wooden train cars, snowy rail lines, camp scenes, timber labor, and Soviet identity documents. The materials do not only establish that deportation occurred. They preserve how people who endured it described the experience.

The fate of the deported Poles changed after June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Norman Naimark says the situation shifted dramatically because the Polish government in exile in London and the Soviet Union suddenly became allies. Formal relations were reestablished in July, followed by an amnesty in August.

That change created a route out for some deportees. About 115,000 people managed to leave the Soviet Union by crossing the Caspian Sea to Iran, which was under British rule. It was there, Naimark says, that many of the depositions and questionnaires were written.

The route out depended on paperwork described in concrete administrative terms. Soviet identity certificates were issued by the NKVD, which Naimark identifies again as the secret police in charge of the camps and settlements. These certificates recorded identifying information: where a person was born and the person’s date of birth. Deportees then used them to exchange for Polish papers that would allow them to leave the Soviet Union.

The certificates shown on screen contain Cyrillic headings, identity photographs, handwriting, typewritten entries, and ink stamps. Some display Soviet and NKVD language; several are headed “Удостоверение.” Their archival path was direct: they ended up with the Polish government in exile and then with the Hoover Institution. Hoover holds about 10,000 of them, a valuable part of the Polish collection.

Norman Naimark places particular weight on the deportation journeys themselves. The testimonies, he says, reveal how people were taken from their homes at night, placed into boxcars, freight cars, and cattle cars, and moved under “terrible conditions.” He describes the transport as part of the “Polish Golgotha” — not merely a means of relocation, but an episode of suffering in its own right.

According to Naimark, many thousands died during these transports. He calls the boxcars “a hell on earth.” The photographs hold close to that account: a woman and child look through a small opening in a wooden train car; snowy tracks stretch into distance; civilians cluster at trains. The archival importance of the testimonies is that they preserve these details at human scale — not just deportation as a category, but hunger, thirst, confinement, exposure, and duration.

Once deportees reached their destinations, the records show firsthand experience of the Gulag: forced labor, hunger, deprivation, and the “vicious brutality” of the system. Photographs depict people using a two-person saw to cut timber, a young boy standing with an axe beside stacked logs, laborers resting on piles of wood, and a bleak camp with wooden barracks and a guard tower.

The testimonies therefore document both process and bodily experience: arrest, deportation, settlement, forced labor, removal from home, transport without food or water, work, hunger, and deprivation. For Naimark, that is what distinguishes this part of the collection from a merely administrative record.

The NKVD certificates are bureaucratic artifacts: identifying details, photographs, stamps, and official paperwork. Set beside thousands of accounts describing forced removal, transport, camp life, labor, hunger, and deprivation, they preserve both the paperwork through which people were controlled and the human experience of that control.

Norman Naimark closes on the moral weight of the material. The Gulag experience, as recorded in these Polish testimonies, shows “man’s brutality to man” and “man’s inhumanity to man.” He calls it “a terrible, awful piece of human history” that should be remembered as a warning against its recurrence.