A Soviet-instigated plan to kill an anti-communist woman journalist in the early years of the Cold War was linked to her attempts to tell the story of thousands of Polish children who in 1940-1941 had been deported with their families from eastern Poland to Siberia and Central Asia where many died from brutal treatment. The assassination plan was revealed in 1953-1954 by a defector to the West from communist-ruled Poland and was never carried out.
In July 1979 an American businessman and former journalist David Harold Karr who had arranged the building of the first Western hotel in Moscow was found dead under reportedly suspicious circumstances in Paris, France. Karr’s new biography, The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr, by Harvey Klehr, expected to be published in July 2019, will…
Cold War Radio Museum The Voice of America (VOA) May-October 1982 English-to-Africa Service Program Schedule flyer included descriptions of “African Sounds” English-to-Africa program, hosted by VOA French-to-Africa Cameroonian-born broadcaster Georges Collinet, and “Music Time in Africa” program hosted by Leo Sarkisian and Rita Rochelle. MUSIC TIME IN AFRICA The Voice of America Program Schedule May-October 1982 English to Africa This…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo (1943) By Ted Lipien U.S. government propaganda pictures taken in 1943 by the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran showed Polish children and women several months after they had come out of Soviet Russia in a mass exodus of former Gulag prisoners and their families. The OWI photographs were carefully staged and their…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo By Ted Lipien Almost no one knows today that one of the targets of misleading Soviet and American propaganda during World War II were Polish refugees fleeing from Russia. Before they were refugees, they were Stalin’s prisoners. The Red Army and the NKVD Soviet secret police occupied their cities, towns and villages in pre-war eastern Poland…
Polish refugee children with a priest, Santa Rosa Colony, Mexico. Julian Plowy Family Album. Before being transported to Mexico from India in 1943 on a U.S. Navy ship, these Polish children were for close to two years prisoners in Soviet Russia along with their parents and families. Some of them lost their mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents and other…
In 1943 nearly 1,500 Polish refugees, many of them children, including orphans, stopped briefly in the United States on their way to their refugee camp in Mexico, called Santa Rosa. Most Americans, however, never learned the true story of these homeless people who had been earlier Stalin’s prisoners while their parents and even some of the older children worked as…
By Ted Lipien Support Silenced Refugees America had its own shameful episode of war crimes, not nearly as brutal as Soviet deportations to the Gulag forced labor camps of many groups and nationalities, but still inexcusable detention of American citizens of Japanese origin and forcing them into internment camps during the Second World War. It is entirely possible that Roosevelt…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo (1943) By Ted Lipien Support Silenced Refugees The extent of the damage the initial propaganda from the Roosevelt administration had on the handling of the Polish World War II refugees story is not always easy to document, but some of the false information has kept reappearing in new forms for many years. After the arrival of…