Towards and Beyond Yalta

The Yalta Conference in February 1945 was the defining moment in the development of the Polish émigré community in Britain. Before the Second World War, the few Poles in this country hardly constituted a community and were invariably, in any case, Jewish refugees from earlier tsarist persecution who did not necessarily regard themselves as being Polish at all. ¹ The Polish forces who began arriving here from 1940 fully expected to return home once the war was over and won. Yalta radically and irrevocably changed all that.