Poland. The Red Army, after the Polish popular uprising was inexorably defeated by the Wehrmacht, finally entered Poland. Thus, Stalin was able to present himself to the world as Poland’s sole liberator, without having to compromise with the Polish rebels, exterminated by the Germans, much less with the Polish ruling class, exterminated years earlier at Katyn and in the Siberian Gulags. For the Polish soldiers of the Second Polish Army Corps, who fought for the liberation of Italy, and all former Gulag prisoners, it was a moment of bitterness and a brutal realization that all was lost again for Poland. For Poland, the freedom lost on September 2, 1939, would return only 50 years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then of the Soviet Union.
