Where have you been?

Although the Jews were by far the worst persecuted group during WWII the Poles were probably the second. At the beginning of the war the Polish were just as likely to be killed/beaten/harassed as the Jews. After the Nazi Final Solution was decided upon there is little comparison in sheer numbers of peopled killed but the Polish suffering lasted for another fifty years under the yoke of Soviet socialism.


This monument at Plac Muranowska in the form of a railcar with several crosses on it is in remembrance of those who were deported or murdered by their Soviet "liberators". Despite what western history books teach kids it was the Soviets who stopped the Nazi war machine in WWII and it was, therefore, the Soviets that dictated who exactly got the spoils of war.


Poland was freed in the early 1990s and this monument was erected shortly after in 1995. Poland continues to suffer from its fifty years of Soviet oppression though, not only from the lost generations but also from the fear of the unknown. Unlike the Czech Republic and Slovakia whose secret communists documents were made public years ago, Poland's secret documents were mostly destroyed at the end of communism and today many politicians accuse their rivals of being Soviet collaborators. There have been countless commissions, public arrests, and books about the subject but never any progress. Recently the IPN has produced a damning report that Nobel Laureate Lech Wałęnsa was really a Soviet spy and was only able to survive because of his Kremlin connections.