A letter from Zofia Młyńczak to her in-laws written from Siberia, where she had been deported in April 1940

On 17 September 1939 the Red Army invades Poland from the East, thus fulfilling Stalin’s obligations towards the Third Reich stipulated in the secret protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The Soviet Union’s government declared that the 13.5 million Polish citizens who lived on the annexed land were now under Soviet rule. From February 1940 to June 1941 Polish citizens were being deported in large numbers into Soviet interior. Deportations affected the families of officers, bureaucrats, police, lawyers, doctors and other representatives of the Polish intelligentsia.