the special list. All "clerical elements" having, or having had, some kind of connection with Poland. Ethnic breakdown Although the Soviet authorities claim that the executed victims were all ethnic Poles, some of those killed were also ethnic Belarusians, Jews, Ukrainians and Russians mistaken and alleged for being ethnic Poles due to their surnames or religious denominations. 47.3% of the total number of "Poles" who were arrested in Belarus were actually ethnic Belarusian Catholics, of whom many declared themselves to be Poles in the 1920s. They made up 14.2% of those arrested in the Polish Operation across the Soviet Union (September–November 1938). 13.4% of those arrested were ethnic Ukrainians. 8.8% of the arrested were ethnic Russians. Killing process and death toll According to archives of the NKVD, 111,091 Poles and people accused of ties with Poland, were sentenced to death, and 28,744 were sentenced to labor camps; 139,835 victims in total. This number constitutes 10% of the total number of people officially convicted during the Yezhovshchina period, based on confirming NKVD documents. According to historian Bogdan Musiał: "It is estimated that Polish losses in the Ukrainian SSR were about 30%, while in the Belorussian SSR... the Polish minority was almost completely annihilated or deported." Musiał is also of the opinion that "it does not seem unlikely, as Soviet statistics indicate, that the number of Poles dropped from 792,000 in 1926 to 627,000 in 1939." Almost all victims of the NKVD shootings were men, wrote Michał Jasiński, most with families. Their wives and children were dealt with by the NKVD Order № 00486. The women were generally sentenced to deportation to Kazakhstan for an average of 5 to 10 years. Orphaned children without relatives willing to take them were put in orphanages to be brought up as Soviet, with no knowledge of their origins. All possessions of the accused were confiscated. The parents of the executed men – as well as their in-laws – were left with nothing to live on, which usually sealed their fate as well. Statistical extrapolation, wrote Jasiński, increases the number of Polish victims in 1937–1938 to around 200–250,000 depending on the size of their families. In Leningrad, the NKVD reviewed local telephone books and arrested almost 7,000 citizens with Polish-sounding name with the vast majority of such nominal "suspects" were executed within 10 days of arrest. In the village of Belostok, Tomsk Oblast, Siberia, 100 men