On 19-20 September 2023, a conference will be held in Pruszków, at which a team investigating the extent of the losses suffered by Poland at the hands of the USSR in 1939-1945 will officially begin its work. “The aim is to prepare a report on the matter,” informed Deputy Foreign Minister Arkadiusz Mularczyk. The venue of the conference is not accidental, as it was in Pruszków that the NKVD treacherously arrested sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State in 1945.

Meanwhile, the director of the Institute of War Losses, Dr Konrad Wnęk, Professor at the Jagiellonian University, said that work is underway to issue an account of the Russian wrongs and crimes. He explained that the publication of a full report on the matter would take place in 2-3 years.

The head of the War Losses Institute pointed out that counting and demarcating losses between those inflicted on Poland by the Soviets and the Germans would be far more difficult.

He pointed issues like „interpretation and the lack of contemporary access to Russian sources. We cannot at the moment send anyone to Moscow or St Petersburg to go through these archives. This is impossible in the current political situation, we must rely on materials that have been collected, for example, by the Russian Memorial, by the Karta centre”, said Konrad Wnęk.

In an interview, he admitted that 20 people are currently involved in the work on the report. Experts who have researched the case so far will deliver their papers in Pruszków. Some of cases have already been prepared, others are being written all the time. Even estimating the value of state property in the pre-war eastern borderlands of the Polish Republic is not easy. And the war only complicated the situation.

“First we were occupied there by the Germans, then by the Soviets. It is a kind of ping-pong. We still have disputes about, for example, the number of Polish citizens deported deep into the Soviet Union”, recalls the head of the War Losses Institute.

Adrian Andrzejewski