Enemies of the State

ENEMIES

OF THE

STATE

Teresa Radomska

for an incredible family who survived the labour camps, their body and spirit sorely tested in the Russian wilderness. They never gave in to Stalin, they fought for their freedom over the many stages of their escape. They will not be forgotten nor will ‘those we left behind, too starved to lift themselves off the ground, we remember our Sybiraks’

Copyright © 2024 Teresa Radomska Hartley

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced in any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, wether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Please note:

‘A Family Exiled’ has now been amended and split into two separate shorter books; ‘Enemies of the State’ (the prequel) and ‘Hurricanes of Polish Fury’ (the sequel – due for publication by end of 2024). This is to allow for an easier read of substantial volume of historical information.

ISBN: 978-1-917425-52-0

Ebook edition

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Uninvited Visitors 10th February 1940

The Family Radomski – Góral

Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt

CHAPTER 1 - Childhood in The Kresy

CHAPTER 2 - Invasion by the Warmongers

CHAPTER 3 - ‘No room for this clique’

CHAPTER 4 - Surviving Siberia

CHAPTER 5 - Liberated

CHAPTER 6 - Flight to Freedom

CHAPTER 7 - Sanctuary and Recovery

CHAPTER 8 - A New Life

CHAPTER 9 - Family Reunited

CHAPTER 10 - Journeys in Detail

CHAPTER 11 - Personal Recollections

CHAPTER 12 - Radomski-Góral bloodline

CHAPTER 13 - A Brief History of Russia

Author’s Notes

And the story continues in the sequel...

Acknowledgements

Sources of research

INTRODUCTION

The Uninvited Visitors 10th February 1940

In honour of my family, let me tell their story as victims of the Russian dictator Stalin, who brutally suppressed anyone or any country that got in his way. Even Lenin thought he could be dangerous, if he had more power than he could handle and so it proved!

The Bolsheviks were everywhere, Stalin had a plan for the Polish Military settlers in the Kresy Kazia thought as she sat by the window watching events unfold, waiting. She had seen German planes pounding her country into submission, many of her friends had already been arrested and she now waited for the knock on her door.

Refugees were escaping from the German invasion in the west, their carts loaded with belongings and there were tanks full of Russian soldiers advancing into Poland from the east. Hitler and Stalin were meeting the terms of their 1939 agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the eradication of the entire Polish nation, its people and culture.

The long awaited knock on the door, or rather, the aggressive entrance into their home, came in the early hours of 10th February 1940 when the NKVD entered. Waving their pistols and shouting, ‘you are an enemy of the people a threat to public order.’ ‘You are under arrest, pack your things, you have one hour, be ready,’ the leader screamed at her.

Many would be stunned into terror and shock but Kazia was ready, had been for weeks, her first thought, how would she get word to her husband who was in hiding from these very Bolsheviks?

She gathered her frightened children together, Alicja, Jasia and Janusz and told them to dress quickly, put as many clothes on as they could and as many as would go into bags. She knew where they were being taken. Memories of her Dziadek and his arrest by the Tzarist Security Police came to mind.

Alicja the eldest headed for the cellar to gather as much food as she could. The children were terrified but did as Kazia asked. She meanwhile got together as much as she thought would be good to barter for what they might later need. She also put the family photographs into a pillow case, covered with towels.

Those photographs travelled over 20,000 kms, protected for future generations and are featured in this memoir.

My Babcia, was incredible, to have such foresight in a most terrifying moment. – With my Mother Alicja, an inspiration to write this story.

After about an hour the Bolsheviks returned and led the family, Kazia, Alicja, Jasia and Janusz outside and under very heavy snowfall bundled them onto a sleigh where some of their neighbours already sat, shivering and so very scared.

They were all terrified and held onto each other tightly and as Kazia looked back to their home she noticed the heavy snow was covering their very existence and saw Cezar their dog lying in the snow, shot by the Soviets. She took a deep breath and kept the sobs at bay.

After about an hour they were met at Lubomyrka station with many goods wagons surrounded by large numbers of Soviet soldiers and many families gathered, cold, frightened, in tears and shock. The Trains stretched as far as the eye could see. Where was Adam. There had been no time to get word to him, would he find them before the trains left Poland?

So began an ordeal for my family and 1.7 million other Polish citizens, exiled by Stalin to the gulags spread over the USSR, There were over 30,000. It was the beginning of many journeys of more than 22,000 km’s over several years. There’s more detail in Chapter 10.

The Polish exiles travelled through Poland to Arctic Russia and other remote parts of the USSR. My family and the military settlers were sent to the Arkhangelsk Oblast.

After the so called ‘amnesty’ in 1941 the family, with others who were just fit enough physically and mentally, escaped from Russia, taking on the most demanding journeys through the Ural mountains, the Kurdistan Steppes, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and eventually into Pahlevi in Persia and freedom. Numerous journeys amounting to about 4,000 kms.

The journeys were long and exhausting with little medical attention along the many stops and a large number didn’t make it, the labour camp conditions taking a toll. The NKVD were also disrupting access to the trains and generally making things difficult.

When they arrived at Tashkent about 30 of the escapees were taken into a field and told to wait. Two days and nights without food or water, no Polish officials there to help them, they were terrified. Then the Uzbeks came and they were put onto a train to Bukhara, then to Vobkent in a yak to work in the fields for the Uzbeks. They were distraught, and still prisoners of Stalin.

Read how Kazia got her daughters Alicja and Jasia, out of the grip of the Uzbeks and the NKVD and into the eventual warm embrace and hospitality of the Persian people. She and my Wujek Janusz were now separated from the girls staying behind in Vobkent, did they ever find each other? Read on....

In Pahlevi, Isfahan and Tehran the refugees were very warmly welcomed by the Persian people who offered them safety and helped them with recovery together with English and Polish Nursing units based there.

This story is one of daily struggles with physical and mental efforts to survive the unspeakable hardship they had gone through. The winters had been icy, mostly -30 and even children were sent into the forests to work in those conditions, my Mum Alicja was just 16, spending that birthday on the train to Russia.

There had been rampant disease and starvation then the despair of losing their country to the Communists, betrayed at Yalta.

Yet the Polish exiles, when eventually recovered, fought on with the Allies to the very end. Their many achievements as an Ally are listed in the Sequel – ‘Hurricanes of Polish Fury’ of this memoir.

I hope I’ve captured your interest to read on and become familiar with a little known episode of WW2.

Teresa Radomska,

Córka i Wnuczka Sybiraczek – 2024

My family and the many other Sybiraks will not be a forgotten part of WW2 history.

‘If you don’t recount your family history

it will be lost.

Honor your own stories and tell them too,

they may not seem very important but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.’

Madelaine L’Engle

INTRODUCTION

The Family Radomski – Góral

My grandparents, Kazia and Adam my mother Alicja, Aunt Janina and Janusz my Uncle at the time of the invasions lived in Równe. Kazia’s brother Walery and his wife Ziuta, sons Włodek and Zbigniew and daughter Marysia were living on their Osada Krechowiecka (named after Adam and Walery’s regiment the 1st Lancers Krechowiecki) just outside Równe and near to the Ukrainian Russian border in the eastern borderlands of Poland. My Grandfather Adam and Great Uncle Walery had been awarded Osadas on the borderlands after the Bolshevik war of 1920 as reward for the success of Poland regaining territory lost in previous partitions.

On the 10th February 1940 on a bitterly cold day at 5am Stalin’s Secret Police, the NKVD, burst into my grandparent’s home waving guns and screaming at them. They were arrested as ‘anti Soviet elements,’ told they were to be exiled to Siberia, stripped of their land and home and given half an hour to pack some belongings. They were then taken to an assembly point outside Równe in a horse drawn sledge passing many of their neighbours awaiting the same fate. Stalin viewed these Military settlers as a danger to his plans to Sovietise parts of Europe as this was the most likely group of people to stand up to him and his plans.

There were 5 mass deportations of the military and civilian populations of eastern Poland in 1939-41 with a clear distinction made between the February 1940 deportation and the April one. The February military deportees were targeted as ‘special settlers’ and sent to zones selected in isolated areas and administered by a special branch of the NKVD. They were sent to 13 Oblasts, Arkhangelsk, Yekaterinburg, Irkulsk, Molotov, Vologda, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Chelysbinsk, Gorki, Czkalovsk, Kirov, Ivanovo and Yaroslavi. Other deportees were sent mainly to Kraij-Altai, and Krasnoyarsk, Komi, Mari, Yakut and Bashkiv.

From their home in Równe they were transported in cattle wagons towards the deep snows of Siberia and the Arctic regions, the train stopping at Gorki after 17 days then onto Sharya from where they had to walk many miles in very deep snow to the labour camp, Poldniewica, the first of 3 camps, later to Duraszewo and finally to Derewalka. Their only crime was being Polish and being ‘an enemy of the people.’

They were expected to work for their communist masters, clearing forests to lay tracks for a railway line, from dawn to dusk on the most meagre rations. Many perished through malnutrition, disease and the cold.

Used as slave labourers they were worked until they dropped. A deportee was a ‘nonperson,’ a slave of the Soviet penal system. Upon arrival at the prison, labour camp or penal colony they were told by the Commandant: ‘Here you will live and here you will die, niechevo, hairs will grow on my palms before you are free.’

By the middle of 1941 most of those Polish citizens had been imprisoned in subhuman conditions throughout Russia, from the Caucasus to the White Sea, in Steppe, Tundra and Taiga, from the Urals, Kazakhstan and onto the mountains of Russian Asia. At the same time 222,000 Polish servicemen arrested in 1940, were imprisoned in Siberian Gulags.

Life was awful from the very beginning but their spirit and determination was so strong, it saw them through the hell of the labour camp, the towers, barbed wire fences, searchlights and the routine aggression towards them. Every day they prayed, ‘do not despair, have faith the Bolsheviks will not break you.’ They suffered incredible hardship and many starved. Survival was of the utmost importance and attitude was a crucial factor and I put their survival down to their faith and love for each other and their spirit, the spirit that Stalin wouldn’t break.

They also had good luck on their side and the kindness of the friends they had made, including the generous acts from the Russians deported there after the Revolution in 1917 which added towards their survival. The Russian people gave shelter when needed and shared what little food they had. The conditions were brutal, lone women were forced to give up their children to Soviet orphanages or watch as they starved to death. It was heart breaking.

Upon Hitler’s attack on the USSR in June 1941 Stalin, unable to withstand Hitler’s forces on his own, had no choice but to enter into an alliance with the West and turned to Churchill and Roosevelt for help. Their condition was the release of his Polish prisoners and the formation of a Polish army. The Soviet Ambassador to the UK Ivan Maisky and General Sikorski on behalf of the Polish Government signed the first diplomatic agreement on 30th July 1941. Maisky then announced that the Soviet-German treaty of August 1939 relating to the territorial division of Poland along the Ribbentrop-Molotov line was no longer valid.

General Anders had been nominated as Commander of the new Polish Army by Genera Sikorski and it was his intention to get as many Poles out of Russia as he could and he did his utmost against a belligerent Stalin. Polish soldiers had been commissioned to travel to the various camps and Kolkhozes across the USSR to gather as many isolated families as they could. The area was vast and the terrain, mountains, forests the sub-arctic climate made it extremely difficult to reach those spread so widely.

Stalin agreed an ‘amnesty’ which assured the release of Polish POWs and civilian deportees which took considerable time to get through to the Poles across the vastness of the USSR. Many were never informed that they were free to leave, the ‘amnesty’ deliberately kept from them to retain their labour. However, by late 1941 25,000 Polish recruits had joined Anders’ Army from the gulags (Buzuluk RU) with civilians joining them and they all headed towards Tehran.

Although Stalin officially complied he made things very difficult with inadequate rations, medical aid and equipment so General Anders demanded that his army be evacuated from the USSR to the Middle East to fight under British command. He also demanded that all Polish civilians leave with him. An invitation to the many Poles incarcerated in labour camps and gulags that they couldn’t refuse despite their hatred for the Bolsheviks, they just wanted to fight the Germans.

In March/April 1942 33,069 Soldiers and 10,879 civilians including 3,100 children were evacuated from USSR and Anders’ army operations moved to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Civilian Poles from the labour camps also headed there and in August-September 1942 43,746

Soldiers from the Gulags and 25,501 civilians including 9,633 children were evacuated to Persia.

The Polish Embassy in Kubyshev in the meantime was struggling to help the many thousands of refugees moving south, fleeing their mistreatment and imprisonment, they were exhausted and suffering from malaria, dysentery, typhus and other ailments, especially the effects of starvation. Their physical condition not able to sustain them through about 4,000 km of Soviet terrain and they had to contend with the NKVD disrupting their journeys and intercepting them for their labour despite the safety to travel towards the Polish army assured them by the ‘amnesty.’

Once discharge papers had been issued my family were faced with the arduous journey from Siberia to Uzbekistan. Like many Poles who made their escape from imprisonment in Russia, they were determined to join the Polish Army gathering in Tashkent. They had no other option and another struggle for survival began. With very little food to sustain them, often ill with dysentery and typhus, they weren’t fit to fight and were separated at times but with great determination they journeyed on towards the Polish army. That was the only thing on their mind, to link up with the Polish army however long it took and they barely survived their ordeal.

The journeys from the labour camp took the family on the Trans Aral, Trans Siberian railways and into five time zones. Briefly, they travelled through the Ural Mountains, skirting the Kurgistan Steppes, through Kazakstan and into Uzbekistan. From Bukhara they were taken to Vobkent and forced by the Soviets, determined to delay them reaching freedom, into hard labour for the Uzbeks. Their physical condition was desperate.

They were only able to leave Vobkent when reunited with Walery who had been searching for them. He had been posted to nearby Tashkent and advised Kazia to enlist my mother and aunt in the Polish cadets in Guzor. The girls set off to Guzor and my grandfather was posted to Iraq whilst Kazia stayed with my uncle Janusz in Vobkent. They were reunited with the girls in Pahlevi sometime later as Kazia had finally managed to enlist Janusz in the cadets. She was now desperately ill in hospital in Tehran.

Once in the safety of Pahlevi in Persia they were out of Stalin’s reach and able to begin their recovery. By this stage they had other journeys to make, to Refugee camps from Pahlevi to Tehran and Isfahan then onto Ghazir and Beirut in Lebanon, where my mother married in 1946 an Englishman serving in the RAF. The family would eventually find a home in England, my Mother and her husband William and Aunt in 1946 and my grandparents and uncle in 1948.

On their arrival at Liverpool docks from Lebanon on 19.2.1948, Kazia Góral nee Radomska, born in Wróblewo on 23.2.1899 presented her Paszport 11445/43c issued in Beirut on 25.2.1943 and was presented with Alien Order A128294.

Adam Góral born Daleszewicze on 26.5.1894, presented his Paszport 11446/43c and was issued his Alien Order A128295.

‘Permission to land at Liverpool was granted on condition that the holder registered at once with the Police’. They were not exempt from restrictions of the Alien Orders until 29.5.1961.

From Liverpool my grandparents and Uncle were assigned to Resettlement Camps in Pulborough, Horsham, Helstem and Ely over a period of time. They had clothing issued to them on 1.3.1948 as they had arrived in England with very little as had many refugees arriving in England after the war. Many of the refugees from Poland were initially subsidised by the Polish Government as they had been in the refugee camps in Persia and Lebanon.

My parents were there to meet them at Liverpool and it was a joyous and emotional day, I was 6 months old, the first born to a free family and it was my Mother’s birthday. Very many tears were shed.

Some thoughts from my Mother, Alicja, regarding refugee families in England. – ‘we made up small pockets of Poland, holding onto whatever fragments remained of our once normal lives. We spoke Polish, German, Russian, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian and Yiddish. We all felt out of place, we knew we were new to this country and that we belonged somewhere else... We were survivors and children of survivors and many of us had lost family members. Marriages were made in haste and some out of desperation, there was a deep need to have someone to hold and love. Most of us were still in shock and grieving for a lost Poland.’

Life in England as a refugee was difficult and my grandparents especially didn’t tell many people of their past, they hid it and somehow dealt with their demons. Physically, the family gradually recovered, yet the mental scars were more difficult to heal. The family had lost absolutely everything, their home, livelihood and liberty and gone through a life threatening experience. There were times when something would trigger a memory and transport them back to the camp and they would feel the fear. I sometimes saw it in my Mother’s eyes and manner and the way she would regularly walk up and down the long lounge struggling with her emotions, walking the memories away.

They would hoard food, treasure it, remembering the starvation in the camps. They always had to have enough food and my Mother’s cupboards were crammed full of tins and packets and jars from the Deli. She and my grandparents never returned to Poland, they didn’t take the opportunity to see their homeland again, the Kresy, it was now part of the Ukraine with the border changes made by Stalin.

I am but one voice, a grandaughter and daughter of an extremely brave family and I have gone through an emotional journey of my own to unravel their past, their suffering which was buried very deep, their stubborn resilience, belief and determination. The Radomski’s were never far behind or ahead of the Góral’s in any of the many routes covered from Poland to the USSR to Persia to Lebanon and finally to England where they were all reunited. They seemed to be connected by a very strong radar of their own, a very lucky family and their defiant spirit shines out still.

I dedicate this memoir specifically to my dahlink Mamusia Alicja, who at 97 still remembers the labour camp in Siberia despite suffering from Alzheimers and to the memory of my beloved grandparents, Kazia and Adam and the other members of the Góral and Radomski family’s who have been my inspiration. My reason for looking into their history, which is my history, a big part of who I am.

There is an irony in the telling of this episode of WW2. Had my family not been deported to Siberia they would most likely have fallen victim to the massacre of Poles in Wołyn and Eastern Galicia, by the Ukrainian Nationalists who razed their town Równe, to the ground and murdered those settlers who had escaped Stalin’s deportations. Between 76,000 and 106,000 were victims of this barbarism, mostly women and children over the entire region, my Babcia’s cousin Toscia and her two infant sons were burned alive. In 2016 the Parliament of Poland passed a resolution recognising the massacres as a Genocide and in the Ukraine to this day the UPA members are celebrated as heroes.

A person is only forgotten

if their name is forgotten,

the Góral -Radomski’s are not forgotten, their name is written into memory in this biography.

Teresa Radomska 2021

Alec, Alicja and Teresa

INTRODUCTION

Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt

In September 1939, in the signing of the Molotov-Ribentrop pact, Stalin with Hitler partitioned Poland in two. I am concentrating mainly on the Russians in this memoir as Stalin was the guilty warmonger who caused huge misery and terror to my family. Millions of Poles, Kulaks, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Soviet veterans and Orthodox Christians died or were executed and many others suffered similar fates. Stalin had seen an opportunity when signing the Pact with Hitler to take revenge on the Polish Military settlers of the Kresy whom he considered ‘enemies of the state.’

I will call this action a Holocaust because it was, without doubt, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity – and this Holocaust of the Polish people and their country is ignored by the West and neither of the perpetrators have made sufficient if any restitution to Poland.

They both inflicted horrors on the Polish people who in 1939 numbered 35 ml and by 1945 were 24 ml. As well as the two main protagonists there was the Ukrainian UPA an ally of Germany who murdered over 100,000 Poles, mostly women and children in Wołyn, Polesia, Galicia, Podilia and Carpathia. Poland had suffered the most awful barbarism inflicted on any nation and unlike the Jewish Holocaust which quite rightly has world wide support the Polish Holocaust appears to have none.

Stalin’s hatred of the Poles was based on class and was the motivation for his first act on entering Poland in 1939 to focus on the bourgeoise of Poland, the elements of Polish society who would most likely oppose Communist rule and this included the military men who had settled the Kresy after the Polish - Russian war of 1920 – men like my grandfather Adam and Great Uncle Walery.

Stalin’s aim was to crush the military families, there was no place for this ‘clique’ in the Soviet order, he had not forgotten the defeat of the 1920 war and he wasted no time in deporting them en masse to the frozen wastelands of Siberia. These Poles were damned in the eyes of the Soviets who hated them. Aristocrats, Military Officers, Judges, writers, teachers, forest workers, land owners, the bourgeoise of Poland, Stalin’s reason for wanting to eliminate them as they posed a threat in being more likely to stand up to him.

Hitler’s plan meanwhile was to establish the supremacy of the Aryan race which meant not just the elimination of Polish Jews but also of Polish Christians, who were referred to by Hitler as ‘subhuman’ (Untermenschen). His hatred for the Polish people in general, was so intense he intended to eliminate them from the face of the earth. One of his initial commands was ‘to send to death mercilessly and without compassion men, women and children of Polish derivation and language.’ His attitude towards the citizens of Warsaw was ‘Every inhabitant of Warsaw has to be killed, including men, women and children and all traces of their existence have to be removed. Do not take any prisoners! Every building has to be razed, Warsaw must be levelled to the ground in order to set a terrifying example to the rest of Europe.’ Adolf Hitler 1944. The Warsaw Uprising had infuriated the German leaders who decided to make an example of the city and its people.

The night time arrests by Stalin’s Secret Police began in 1940 without explanation or warning when they arrested over 250,000 civilians, ‘anti-Soviet elements’ and took them to already waiting transport, – cattle wagons primed for the journey to exile. Without adequate clothing in the bitterly cold winter and very little food, it would lead to the starvation of hundreds of thousands who were faced with the ever present stench of death, gnawing hunger and oppression by the NKVD.

Poles were also to suffer the first of many deaths at Auschwitz for which the camp had initially been built in 1940, to hold Polish political prisoners, the first group arriving in June 1940. By October 1941 20,000 Polish Catholics and 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war had been ‘processed’ at Auschwitz. The Germans forcibly deported approximately 2.8 ml Polish gentiles into labour for the Third Reich and the Russians had deported almost 1.7 ml Poles to Siberia by June 1941. An innocent people terrorised by two tyrants who then suffered massacres at the hands of the UPA.

There is no argument that Hitler abhorred Jews and caused so many ruthless deaths, I do not wish to lessen the enormity of the murders in the Holocaust but there were others, non-Jewish victims who are forgotten from Remembrances. So many precious lives were lost, over 3,000,000 were Polish Christians.

Despite being under constant surveillance, many Poles risked their lives to help Jews during the occupations and many were murdered for helping Jews. Poland was the only country in Europe with the death penalty imposed ruthlessly by German death squads for helping their brother Poles. They were also terrorized into transporting Jews to the Concentration camps and not to comply would have meant death to them and their family. Many Polish railway workers were also forced into transporting their countrymen to the prison camps and gulags across the Soviet Union.

In June 1941 Hitler declared war on the USSR, in Operation Barbarossa and a Polish-Soviet agreement was signed, the Sikorski-Maiski, after the reinstatement of Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations. On the signing of that agreement in August 1941 Stalin had agreed to revoke the Poland related aspects of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 and an ‘amnesty’ was declared for the Polish citizens in the labour camps and gulags across Russia. This prompted a massive exodus of Poles fleeing the USSR to join the Polish Army in Iran.

Stories like this are unknown to many westerners and when told they find it difficult to comprehend the depravation of what 1.7 ml Polish deportees went through. Not many Western history books record this episode and few politicians honour these victims in speeches commemorating World War II. From a personal view accounts of the war are incomplete without this neglected historical tragedy which is also mostly unknown of in Poland’s communist era, not taught in schools and forbidden to be spoken of.

There are many photographs in the public domain showing victims from German extermination camps and scenes of German atrocities but not a single photo of a Polish adult prisoner of the Soviet gulag! Or of a Polish Mother and child as they really looked after escaping out of Russia, starved, skeletal and in rags. The legacy of silence and disinformation and deception to which the Roosevelt administration went to during the war remains to this day unchallenged and is an affront to historical truth.

The US propaganda machine, the OWI, (Office of War Information) held back photos of skeletal Polish children, taken in August 1942 by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Szymanski of the US army, publishing instead those of healthy children. Szymanski’s photograph’s and report of his observations on the deplorable condition of the refugees was classified as ‘secret’ and not published until 1952. Such was Roosevelt’s fear that Americans, especially Polish Americans would learn the truth about Stalin’s crimes against Poland and her people, his brutality was ignored so as not to upset the alliance with him! – although this is hugely questionable.

Roosevelt hid the Soviet mass murder of Polish POWs in Katyn and supressed an official US Government report of it as well as ignoring a British report from Churchill. A Polish Officer, Intelligence agent & Resistance leader, Witold Pilecki presented his report on the mass murder of Jews in German occupied Poland to the Allies which was ignored. Jan Karski,