Camp Polonia (now called Campolo, though the origin of that name is no longer widely known locally) was a district of Ahvaz,

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

, which housed Polish refugees during World War II. The refugees were Polish citizens who with the outbreak of World War II, had been deported into the Soviet Union, but were then released when Stalin declared amnesty for the Poles, and were then allowed to leave the USSR in 1942 to go to the refugee camps in Iran and later British held India. Over 115,000 arrived in Iran, roughly 75,000 were soldiers, cadets, and officers of what was known as Anders’ Army, a Polish army in exile that had assembled in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

under the command of General Wladyslaw Anders. The rest were mothers and babies, elderly men and women, and children. At least three thousand of these refugees being Jewish, including four rabbis and nearly 1,000 unaccompanied children who were taken from Polish orphanages in the Soviet Union. At the close of World War II, Ahvaz was one of the main exit centers for Poles leaving Iran, and the last Ahvaz camp closed in 1945.

References

Refugee camps in Iran Refugee camps by refugee origin Poland in World War II Polish diaspora in Asia Ahvaz {{Poland-hist-stub