Iran stood as a beacon of freedom and hope for almost a
million Polish citizens.
"Exhausted by hard labour, disease and starvation - barely recognizable as
human beings - we disembarked at the port of Pahlevi (Anzali), on the Caspian shore of Northern Iran. There, we knelt down together in our thousands along the sandy shoreline to kiss the soil of Persia. We had escaped Siberia, and were free at last. We had reached our longed-for "Promised Land"." Helena Woloch
In Tehran's Dulab cemetery, situated in a rundown area of the city, are the
graves of thousands of Polish men, women and children. It is not the only
such cemetery in Iran, but it is the largest and most well-known. All of the
gravestones, row upon row of them, bear the same date: 1942.
In that year, Iran stood as a beacon of freedom and hope for almost a
million Polish citizens released from the Soviet labor camps of Siberia and
Kazakhstan. After enduring terrible conditions travelling across Russia,
115,000 of them were eventually allowed to enter Iran. Most of them went on
to join the allied armies in the Middle East. The rest (mostly women and
children) remained guests of Iran for up to three years, their lives totally
transformed in the process. They never forgot the debt they owed to the
country that had so generously opened its doors to them. Their
reminiscences, as well as the many graves left behind in Tehran, Anzali and
Ahvaz, are testimony to a chapter of Iranian history almost erased from the
public memory.
From Poland to Iran
(
http://www.rozanehmagazine.com/JanFeb2005/apoilishiniran.html)
In 1939, the Soviet Union had participated with Nazi Germany in the invasion
and partition of Poland. In the months that followed, the Soviets began a
policy of ethnic cleansing in the area to weed out what they called
"socially dangerous and anti-soviet elements". As a result, an estimated 1.5
million civilians were forcibly expelled from their homes in the course of
four mass deportations. Thrust at gunpoint into cattle trucks, they were
transported to remote labour camps all over Siberia and Kazakhstan. [1]
Their fate was completely changed in June 1941 when Germany unexpectedly
attacked Russia. In need of as many allies it could find, Russia agreed to
release all the Polish citizens it held in captivity. [2] Shortly
afterwards, provision was also made for the creation of an army from these
newly-freed prisoners. It was to be commanded by General Wladyslaw Anders,
recently released from the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Stalin intended to
mobilize this new army immediately against the Germans in the West; but
Anders persuaded him to hold back until the Poles had recovered their health
and strength after two years of exhaustion in the labour camps.
Swept onwards by the rumours that Stalin was about to allow some of them to
leave his "Soviet Paradise", these former prisoners of the Gulag system
began a desperate journey southwards, some of them on foot, to reach the
reception camps set up for them on the borders of Iran and Afghanistan. They
travelled thousands of miles from their places of exile in the most distant
regions of the Soviet Union. It was an exodus of biblical proportions in
terrible conditions. Many froze to death on the journey or starved. Others
kept themselves alive by selling whatever personal objects they had been
fortunate enough to have brought with them. Exhausted mothers, unable to
walk any further, placed their children into the arms of strangers to save
them from certain death. [3]
Arrived at the army reception camps in Tashkent, Kermine, Samarkand and
Ashkhabad, the refugees attempted to enlist in the Polish army, for which
the Soviets had allocated some food and provisions. There was nothing,
however, for the hundreds of thousands of hungry civilians, mostly women and
children, who were camped outside the military bases. Instead of increasing
provisions to the camps, the Soviets actually cut them. In response, the
Polish army enlisted as many of the civilians as they could into its ranks,
even children (regardless of age or sex) to save them from starvation. In
the baking heat, dysentery, typhus, and scarlet fever became rampant.
Communal graves in Uzbekistan could not keep up with the numbers who were
dying. By 1942, only half of the 1.7 million Polish citizens arrested by the
Soviets at the start of the war were still alive.
Their salvation finally came when Stalin was persuaded to evacuate a
fraction of the Polish forces to Iran. A small number of civilians were
allowed to accompany them. The rest had no option but to remain behind and
face their fate as Soviet citizens.
http://polandiran.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html
its a very long article if you wand read the rest on the blog
"I am Darius the great king, king of kings, king of countries containing all kinds of men , king in this great earth far and wide , Son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenid , a Persian , son of a Persian , an Aryan , having Aryan lineage." Darius the Great 500 BC persia
