Remembering The Katyn Massacre

The discovery of the mass grave of over 4000 Polish soldiers in the Katyn forest in the Soviet Union by the Nazis in 1943 began the recording of a Polish historical tragedy that has become known as “Katyn massacre”. These bodies were just some of over 20,000 Polish officers and elites, exterminated by the Russians in 1940, after Poland was divided between the Soviets and the Nazi Germans. Dr Patryk Pleskot works with the National Institute of Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish Nation, which was established on 18 December 1998 in Warsaw. The history of the “Katyn” massacres has become central to modern Polish identity – and to explain why, Patryk Pleskot addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 5 March 2013. The paper which follows has been taken from a transcript of Dr Pleskot’s speech. 

REMEMBERING THE KATYN MASSACRE 

PATRYK PLESKOT

 Thank you for having me here. At the end of 2012, Barack Obama’s administration decided to declassify some materials concerning the Katyn massacre. These documents concerned activities of the secret service and American Intelligence during the Eisenhower administration. This was big news in Poland. I was invited to on to live TV before I had a chance to examine the new material. So, I was a little apprehensive. I had to improvise. Katyn and the massacre is still very important in Poland. It is still one of our points of reference in constructing our national identity

I would like to give you a brief outline, a general view, on the current state of knowledge concerning Katyn. I also want to point out the similarities in Nazi and Soviet plans for extermination of the Polish elite. I’ll try to explain what really happened in the spring of 1940 when the Katyn massacre (or Katyn Homicide or Katyn action) took place. And what happened next, as the instrumentation or memorialisation of Katyn from the point of view of Nazi and Soviet propaganda.

There would have been no Second World War without the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact on 21 August 1939. War started on 1 September 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Poland and the British response. Two weeks later, there was the Soviet invasion of Poland. As Poles, we had no chance to win this war. We faced two totalitarian regimes, simultaneously attacking Polish states. At first the Nazi-Soviet Pact attracted caricatures in the Polish press – a few days later it turned out not to be so funny. The reality was death.

Poland was divided into two occupation zones – Nazi and Soviet. There was no more Polish Poland. So, what was the plan of Nazi and Soviet occupants toward the Polish people? The plans were very similar – they wanted to exterminate Polish elites. From the German point of view it was a question of racist ideology. Poles should become slaves because as a slave you don’t have any intelligentsia, there are no elites. The Germans began the execution of the Polish intelligentsia (known as AB-Aktion ) in several cities and towns in the Nazi occupation zone. Several thousand people were killed.

For the Russians, Polish elites or the intelligentsia were counter-revolutionary or reactionist. They were to be eliminated in order to create a communist state, of course, in the Stalinist style. So, if we had AB-Aktion in the German occupation zone, we had Katyn action in the Soviet occupation regions. This meant deportation or simply the execution (extermination) of people. There was little difference between the two zones from the Polish point of view.

After the defeat of the Polish army, the majority of officers who had not been killed were detained, imprisoned in the prisoner of war camps for Polish officers. There were three major prisoner of war camps. First was Kozelsk holding more than 4,500 prisoners of war – mainly officers and intelligentsia, a few generals, colonels, etc. The second was Starobelsk with more than 4000 prisoners of war, once again some officers, members of intelligentsia, and a few generals. The third one, the biggest one with the most diverse collection of detainees was in Ostashkov in today’s West Ukraine. Here more than 6500 prisoners of war were imprisoned. Among them were not only army officers but senior national police, borderline police, former Polish counter-intelligence officers, warders, advocates, judges, landowners, priests and so on. A mixture of the functionaries of broad associations were perceived by the Russians as Polish elites which should be eliminated somehow.

Apart from these three major prisoner of war camps, there were also civil prisons holding a large number of prisoners – more than 18,500 prisoners, and not only officers but civilians and soldiers. The divisions are not very clear. There was some chaos in the categories of elites. More than 5000 were termed “spies” and “saboteurs” – anyone could be accused of being a spy or saboteur and the term covered a very broad spectrum – former land owners, members of counter-revolutionary organisations, refugees and so on.

“Refugee” was an interesting category because refugees were mainly Jews trying to escape to the West. Just imagine Jews escaping to the Nazi zone. They were under the misapprehension that the Nazi occupation was better than the Soviet one, which just shows how bad life was for Jews in the Soviet zone.

A section of these civil prisons were special prisons ruled by Soviet political police, which later became KGB. We can call these KGB prisons. We don’t know a lot about these secret, special prisons. The documents are still closed, or classified. These camps of prisoners, civil prisons of the KGB, had a problem with what to do with all the detainees. There were more than 30,000 people to cope with.

There were negotiations and finally, on 5 March 1940, Stalin decided to just eliminate them. He signed documents authorising the massive homicide of not only Polish, but mainly Polish, police, citizens, officers and those belonging to what was termed the Polish elite. It was a massive operation. The human logistics – in the worst meaning of the words – was quite similar to what the Germans were doing with their concentration camps.

This was a massive, logistical operation – to transport so many from the prisoner camps and civil prisons to extermination points. It began in early April 1940. I will try to picture this for you.

Katyn is a symbol – there are many places which are hidden behind this symbol. Katyn was the place of the massacred bodies which was discovered and that is why we call the whole episode “Katyn”. But we have since discovered more than 100 places where the mass graves of Polish citizens exist from this 1940 extermination of Polish elites. From the KGB or civil prisons, many people were transferred to Kiev, Kherson, Kharkiv, and areas near Minsk and Wilno. Also from Kharkiv to Piatichatki, from Kozelsk to Katyn in Smolensk, and from Ostashkov to Kalinin in Miednoje. It’s a really huge canvass, not just Katyn.

To make things even worse, while these elites were being killed in places like Katyn, their families were being deported to the east. At this very same time, April 1940, the Russians were carrying out the deportation of over 60,000 people, mainly the families of the officers, to Kazakhstan. This was a huge social engineering action.

What about the effects? The vast majority of all these people being killed were from Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov but also from similar prisons. We have now identified a minimum of 21,000 people who were murdered in this operation. It was much more than this but we cannot discover exactly how many more.

We have a problem with the discovery of the mass grave at Katyn also. Katyn was discovered by the Nazis. And they made detailed documentations of the findings there. It was professionally done. But this discovery by Nazis meant it was regarded with suspicion in the West. And this was complicated by a Nazi propaganda campaign, from the documentation, to discredit their Soviet opponents. This made the whole tragedy a double one – not only were these people murdered but their memory was killed as well by the misuse of it. Such propaganda diminished the memory of the murdered.

Then, after the Soviet take-over of Poland with the defeat of Nazi Germany, there was a further abuse of the memory of these tragic deaths. At this point, the Soviets made up their own story, blaming the mass extermination on the Nazis. The history the Soviets created and the monuments they erected to the dead were all totally artificial, a complete lie. And even worse, the Soviets managed to deliberately confuse the Katyn murders with actual Nazi atrocities in Khatyn, in Belarus, since the two names had a similar sound in English. And the Soviet version took hold in Poland under the communist system so that it became the official history.

Yet, the secret did not go away. The families of the dead knew the truth. The children of those families passed on the stories of what had really happened. Small publications and leaflets handed around recorded the truth. It was a social memory that kept the history. And many Polish migrants to the West also continued to spread the story of “Katyn”. In the United States, Western Europe and even in Australia.

And, after 1989, the east opened up. The truth could be investigated. Art also contributed to the restoration of the real history of Katyn. Quite famous in this is the painting of “Mother Mary from Kozielsk” where the Virgin Mary holds the head of her dead son which has a bullet hole in its skull. As in the heads found in the mass graves from the exterminations of 1940. There is also the picture by Zdzislaw Beksinski of a haunting mass of bodies in a pit-like vision of hell. And the 2007 film Katyn by Andrzej Wajda.

One of the saddest moments in the history of the memorialising of these exterminations, known as Katyn, was the plane crash near Smolensk in Russia on 10 April 2010 that killed the Polish president and his wife, the former president, the chief of the Polish General Staff and other Polish officers and relatives of the Katyn victims among 96 casualties in total from the crash. They were on their way to a site just outside Smolensk to commemorate the 70^th anniversary of the massacres. And then, as a goodwill gesture around this tragic event, President Putin declassified further documents that would advance more of the history of these historic exterminations.

The story of the Katyn exterminations story is a very important part of Polish history and Polish relations with Russia. It continues to shape, in a sense, our modern, Polish identity. And, even now, we still do not know all there is that happened in the Katyn story. We shall continue to go deeper – as we do, we shall find more of who we are.