The Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939: On 23 August 1939 in Moscow the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, and the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a nonaggression pact, which included a secret protocol, presaging inter alia the Polish territorial division on the Narew-Vistula-San river-line as a result of the war. On 17 September Red Army entered the territory of the eastern Poland waging war with Germany since 1 September. The official reason was to intervene in defense of the Belarusian and Ukrainian population living in the eastern borderlands. The Red Army encountered very little resistance of the few Border Defense Corps units. The Polish government did not declare war on the USSR, although it condemned the aggression. The C-in-C Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly ordered not to engage in offensive combat with the Soviet troops. That same day, Sept. 17, the Polish government and commander in chief left the Polish territory and found themselves in Romania. On 22 September the Soviet troops occupied Lvov. On 28 September the second Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement was signed, under which the border between the Soviet and German occupation zones was moved to the Bug River.
Soviet invasion on Poland in 1939
The term was created within the framework of the project Zapisywanie świata żydowskiego w Polsce [recording the Jewish environment in Poland], whose author is Anka Grupińska, a well-known Polish journalist and writer, specializing in the modern history of the Polish Jews. The project, initiated in 2006 by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, consists in recording interviews with Polish Jews from all generations.
