In 1936 began one of the most tragic chapters in the history of Poles living in the Soviet Union. The authorities of the USSR decided to carry out the mass deportation of Polish families from Soviet Ukraine to Kazakhstan. People were brutally torn from their homes and loaded into freight trains. They were sent to the endless steppes, where they faced hunger, hard labor, disease, and a daily struggle for survival.

The first major deportation affected around 70,000 people, the vast majority of them Poles. Many never returned to their homeland. On the 90th anniversary of these events, the IPN presents a unique video produced by the IPN’s Office of International Cooperation using AI technology.

This modern visual form makes it possible to tell the story of people from whom everything was meant to be taken away: their homes, security, and future. Yet their memory, language, and Polish identity could not be taken from them.

The film recalls the fate of deported families and conveys the emotions accompanying the experience of exile, loneliness, and the struggle to preserve Polish identity on the “inhuman land.”

On 30 May, we remember one of the lesser-known, yet extraordinarily tragic, manifestations of Soviet terror against Poles. This year’s commemorations of the 90th anniversary of the deportations of Poles to Kazakhstan coincide with Kazakhstan’s Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression and the Great Famine, observed on May 31 - a day dedicated to the memory of millions of victims of Soviet terror, deportations, and labour camps.