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KATYN: Let Truth and Justice PrevailBy Monika AM Skowronska (’74) (Editor’s note: The Katyn massacre was a mass execution of approximately 22,000 to 26,000 Polish nationals carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland.) 72 years! That is how long is has taken my family to be allowed by history to bury my maternal grandfather. And here I am boarding a Polish “official” train in the dead of night in a bitterly cold, windy late September Warsaw. As the train speeds across south eastern Poland and the Ukraine, it carries its precious cargo of the true victims of the “Katyn” crimes , namely the children and the grandchildren of the thousands of innocent men of all faiths whose only crime was that they were Polish and were seen as a class of people who would not cooperate with their Soviet enemy in the enslavement of the Polish nation, and had to be decimated. The order was given, in the spring of 1940, at the highest Soviet state levels to round up all the Polish political prisoners in the all too many overflowing local prisons both in and around Lwow. This order was one of five, all given simultaneously with the same purpose and intent. (Three known sites, namely the Katyn Forest, Charkow and Miednoje, a fifth somewhere in the current Belarus. That list has not yet been revealed to the Poles. The families of those victims continue to wait.) The speed and efficiency of the operation was such that in some instances no sooner had men been arrested and detained that they too were bundled onto trains to join at great speed the earlier detainees already held in Kiev prison so that the massacre deadline could be met and the task could be as complete as possible. It is believed that they were shot in the bowels of that prison, in this instance 3497 men and three women of whom two were barely 17 years old. Were they blindfolded, were their hands tied by string or barbed wire as in the case of their Katyn Forest counterparts? Did they walk into the room as innocently as the Russian Tsar and his family had done some twenty odd years earlier, did they recognize the signs, were they frightened? It matters not. Suffice it to say that the KGB had taken possession of the nearby forest of Bykownia as early as 1937 and used that forest as a dumping ground for all of their victims well into 1945. Thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians including women and probably children lie unidentified to this day under the soft sandy soil of that forest in many unmarked mass graves, joined in their eternal sleep by the “imported” Poles. It is all too often forgotten what an efficient killing machine the KGB could be. The forest was a convenient site as it could be accessed by a tram line. The cabins were taken off the tram cars so that 23 bodies at a time could be thrown into the now open cars and transported along a normal tram line. Was this done in broad daylight or at night? Was the local population kept at bay by some curfew measure or another? Much of that remains hidden to this day. But a wounded city never forgot. And people went to the forest over the intervening decades and tied poignant yellow ribbons around powerful tree trunks whilst their Polish counterparts remembered both on Polish soil and in exile. And all the while the truth was known by western governments who collaborated in this conspiracy of silence hoping that all these victims could be conveniently brushed aside. And here we now are Ukrainians, Poles, Brits, Americans, Australians, that melange of post WWII Europe which has given us different passports and a multitude of national allegiances, all together assembled in the core of a pine forest, a site oppressed by the prevailing silence (that cliché of clichés) that even the birds won’t venture here as true as in other places of communal murder no longer just in Europe but regrettably in other killing fields across the globe. The Poles have worked closely with the Ukrainians, determined that the Polish victims be exhumed, identified and given a religious burial. This is all part of a healing process needed not only by families but by a whole nation. In 2000, the Ukrainians resolved to commemorate the thousands of Bykownia victims by creating a memorial to victims of a totalitarian regime, such a memorial to incorporate a Polish cemetery. Fortunately successive Ukrainian administrations, despite their own internal issues, have not detracted from those plans and today, on the 21st September 2012, both the Polish President and the Ukrainian President stand side by side, and both national flags flutter together. Their speeches will reflect muted sound bites, noises about peace, humanity and above all a Ukraine brought into her European Community family fold. But as I nod automatically in acquiescence , I am standing in the closest of proximity to both heads of state and yet my thoughts drift away and in truth I can barely remember what has just been said. My only consolation is that people will now have somewhere to go and remember. I hope that this memorial will become one of Kiev’s important sites made accessible to the ordinary tourist. For the time being, there are no signs in English and I suspect that accessibility will be very difficult especially if you do not speak the language or are unaware of this historical chapter. The forest of Bykownia has to become an international pilgrimage site and not just be remembered by the very few touched by history. I am today 6 years older than my grandfather was when he was murdered. Our lives could not be more dissimilar. I have never known danger other than when I was mugged as a child outside the Lycée with Odette Springer as we were waiting on Madison Avenue for a number 4 bus to take us home. World conflict has occurred but always beyond the purview of my existence, consigned to the news pages and broadcasts. He was born in an occupied Poland, admittedly within the Austro Hungarian Empire which allowed for greater latitude at times. His father had been an insurrectionist as a 12 year old boy. My grandfather conspired from the age of 17/18 in Pilsudski’s independence movement. He had a pseudonym and changed his surname to an Austrian name but we know no more. He then astounded his family by becoming a regular Austrian officer. He could well have been operating under cover and under orders, a fact which he would not have been able to share with his family without endangering them. On 22 December 1914, after a battle lasting 18 hours, he was taken prisoner by the Tsarist army and removed to Semipalatynsk as a POW. But then came the Russian revolution of 1917 and the machinery of the Russian state began to crumble. The Poles joined the White Russians and the Czechs: the plan to fight their way out back to Poland. This Polish 5th Army unit was part of the Polish Army units being formed in France by General Haller, thus by a quirk of fate uniting the Western and the Eastern fronts of WWI. Today I have pinned my grandfather’s medals in the midst of which hangs his “Medaille Interalliée”. The Siberian front had a strange romance about it. They seemed to fight around, in and out of trains. Trains, sabotage and counterespionage were to become specialized traits in my grandfather’s later military career. Taken POW for a second time this time by the Soviets he was not released until 1922 by which time the world had moved on. He remained in the Polish Army. In 1939 he disregarded any order to leave Poland and embark upon the long road to freedom, first to France, and when France fell, to Britain. He chose to remain on home soil involved in the Polish underground resistance fledgling movement. But then on the night of 9/10 December 1939 he returned home to his wife and daughter. That night many of the 3500 Katyn (Bykownia) victims were rounded up. He appeared to know of these impending events. Had he intended to shield and protect his family by sacrificing himself? If so it was to no avail as both his wife and daughter were removed forcibly from Lwow on April 13 1940 by the occupying Soviets, destination Semipalatynsk! He himself would be murdered within a few days of that very same date. My grandfather was by all accounts a very gentle man, a great ideologist, and despite all that he had seen and witnessed a believer in human strength and dignity. I know that he could not be prouder of sharing his faiths with so many fellow countrymen. And I suspect he is proud of me for making this pilgrimage and looking for him. So here I am bearing his medals, laying a wreath of English poppies on a plaque bearing his name and commemorating him and his achievements in this strange far away forest which can best be described as “une foret ensorcelée”. I am a Brit, born in New York, of Polish ancestry, brought up by the French, a by-product of the century old friendship between the Poles and the French, having worked and lived in South East Asia for so very long with a piece of the Ukraine now firmly implanted in my family history. On the eve of the centenary of the outbreak of WWI which we will be commemorating with great intensity here in Britain, I think it only right to remember the men of the eastern front. The statistics of deaths on the battle front, deaths in POW camps, the numbers of maimed and injured, the men who never returned home as their families had been wiped out and their lands turned over to another sovereign state , all these facts have been forgotten as we speak of the atrocities of the Western front. So many men died for the elusive idea of freedom and national sovereignty, often forced to fight their fellow countrymen whom history had cast into another camp. I wrote on the family wreath: “Let truth and justice prevail”. I feel as if these words have brought me up from the cradle. They have moulded my very existence, my career as a lawyer and my current near obsession to bring such recent history back to the forefront of the next generations. For as a wise man once said you cannot look into the future if you do not know your past. That is the best gift we can impart to our children so that they can build a better and peaceful world. But history has had the last word. Yes I went to the Ukraine to bury my grandfather. In the intervening decades up and until perestroika, the KGB dug up the Polish mass graves more than once. The bodies were stripped, the remains disassembled and mixed up, and more importantly the remains of 1500 men were removed. The KGB secrets remain intact to this day and the authorities continue to refuse to open up archival files. The Polish authorities have persistently refused to take family DNAs nor have they sought to match the victims DNAs. The fate of my grandfather remains unknown........has truth and justice really prevailed? |
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