Forced deportations of Polish citizens to Russia is one of the most tragic pages in our history, wrote Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in a letter to the participants of the opening ceremony of the Siberian Memorial Museum. “It is a drama that we still remember and which remains an unhealed wound for us to this day,” he added.
Morawiecki, in a letter read out by the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Culture, National Heritage and Sport, Piotr Gliński, stressed that “the opening of the Siberian Memorial Museum is a good step towards broadening our knowledge of the painful pages of history”.
He recalled that “the history of Sybiraks began not in the 20th century, but in the 19th century with the imperial repressions and mass deportations that affected tens of thousands of patriotic and political activists, as well as their families”.
“Later, the actions of the communists were closer to us and more known, as a result of which, according to various estimates, between half a million and over one and a half million Polish citizens found themselves in Siberia and Kazakhstan,” he stressed. As he emphasized, “many stayed there forever, many lost their lives”.
“It is impossible to describe and forget the enormity of the suffering the exiles experienced,” assessed Morawiecki.
Sybiraks refers to Poles imprisoned or exiled to Siberia.