One of the benefits to living in a technological age is the availability of materials online. Not only are articles, maps, statistics, etc. available online, but whole books as well. This is beneficial to the scholar who does not have easy access to a wealth of materials at his or her home institution. Furthermore, using databases that offer full-text enriches anyone's research.
There are open-web and subcription sites that offer full-text. Open web databases deal with the current subject better than the subscription ones. The main focus on this page are the open-web databases that offer the best results.
Biblioteka Narodowa offers a digital library called Cyfrowa Biblioteka Narodowa/ Click on the Polish flag for the Polish version of the website, which is more informative than the English version.
This website is very well-organized and it is catered to the scholar and savvy researcher. There are collections of items already created that deal with important events in Polish history. Such collections exists for the topic at hand.
includes a massive amount of texts for the scholar to view; more than 6000. The front page of the collection includes an introduction, a list of sources, as well as a bibliogprahy. A scholar can use this collection for general background information about this region of Poland, as well as the specific topic of deportation during WWII. The collection includes books and periodicals. The scope of the collections exceeds the need of this topic, but it is not to be missed. It is worth a thorough look.
is another collection that offers a lot of information, especially about Soviet actions within Poland after occupying the Polish territory in 1939. Particularly, this collection is excellent for newspaper publications.
One caveat to note about the cBN website, as well as other regional library sites, is that some content is not available outside of Poland because of copyright laws. It is a possibility to see if InterLibrary Loan will bring the source to you. If not, one must go to Poland to see. Knowing that these sources exist, however, makes a great argument for grant proposals.
This German site offers access to a lot of full-text resources, including the OAI-ster union catalog. A search here links to several regional libraries of Poland and their digital holdings. It might be the way everything is indexed, but specific searches, such as "deportacja" or even "kresy" does not result in any resources. For OAI-ster, it is best do a search with the general okupacja. This results in 1933 items, many of which are relevant to the deportation topic.
Adam Zarski. Okupacyjna wspomnienia z Boryslawa i opowiadania ZSRR (Wroclaw: Centrix.pl s.c. Krzysztof Cebula i Tomasz Kalota, 2007). This source is full of materials about the deportation of the author into the depths of the USSR. There are documents and person narratives included as well as historical analysis. The book is downloaded in .pdf format.
Wojciech Sleszynski. Okupacja sowiecka na Bialostocczyznie w latach 1939-1941: propaganda i indoktrynacja (Bialystok: Bialystockie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 2001) Although this may not seem like a pertinent source, the author discusses how the Soviets took over and what happened to the youth and society when they did. This source gives excellent background information.
Note: As with the cBN above, some of the documents are not viewable outside of Poland. Some are in .pdf format while others require a different type of software in order to download. This is easy enough to deal with.
