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They Shall Not Be Forgotten:
Remembering the Victims of Katyn
by Michael Whitcraft
Reflecting on the sad state to which Communism
had reduced him one cold autumn evening in 1948, Whittaker
Chambers describes feeling that he no longer had the will
to continue his struggles against the Communist party. “It
was that death of the will which Communism, with great cunning,
always tries to induce in its victims.”1
To bring this reality to the forefront,
over 100 Polish Americans gathered at the National Katyn
Memorial in Baltimore, Md. on April 24, 2005 to remember
a massacre, in which 20,000 Polish military officers (mostly
reservists) were brutally killed in and around Russia’s
Katyn Forest in 1940. These included priests, doctors, professors,
school teachers, lawyers, judges, civil servants and others.
The massacre was directed against Poland’s
religious, cultural and intellectual elite, exemplifying
Mr. Chamber’s words with one important difference.
The Katyn Massacre was not only an attempt to kill the will
of an individual, but that of an entire nation.
A Yearly Remembrance
This year’s event was the fifth
annual remembrance at the National Katyn Memorial in Baltimore.
The day’s events began with a Mass at Holy Rosary
Parish in downtown Baltimore. After coffee and doughnuts,
attendees went to the nearby National Katyn Memorial at
the intersection of President and Aliceanna Streets.
The monument consists of a large gold-colored
flame, a symbol of rebirth or transformation. Amid the flames
stand statues of great personages from Poland’s history,
including: Boleslaw Chrobry, the first crowned king of Poland
and King Jan Sobieski, who led his winged hussars to defeat
the Turks and lift the siege of Vienna.
Despite a frigid wind, the attendees remained
committed to carry on to the end. One jovial middle-aged
man commented: “Every time we plan an event at the
memorial, we can be sure there will be bad weather. At least
it did not rain this year.”
The impressive list of guest speakers
included a representative from Gov. Robert Erlich’s
office and U.S. Senator Paul S. Sarbanes (D).
Fifteen young girls, dressed in beautiful
traditional Polish dresses, added life to the event by dancing
national folk dances.
After the memorial at the monument, attendees
were invited for a meal at the Polish National Alliance building
a few blocks away. During the meal two aluminum plaques were
unveiled: one explaining the Katyn Massacre and another describing
the monument. These will be placed at the monument's base
to explain its significance to passersby.
During the meal, members of the National
Katyn Memorial Foundation spoke on the importance of remembering
the Katyn Massacre and spreading awareness so that such
a tragedy never occurs again.
The Massacre
To fully understand the significance
of the Katyn Massacre, it helps to look back to the beginning
of World War II. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded
Poland from the west, an event which sparked the outbreak
of the war. A couple of weeks later, the Soviet Union, at
that time allied with the Nazis, invaded from the east.
Sandwiched by this Soviet-Nazi alliance, Poland fought valiantly
before falling to the two invaders.
The Soviet rulers terrorized Poland, sending
1.5 million citizens to Siberia, capturing 250,000 military
personnel and sending over 20,000 border-guard officers to
three Soviet prison camps.
These 20,000 (most of them reservists)
were composed of priests, professors, judges, civil servants
and others. In the words inscribed on the Katyn monument’s
new plaque, “They were Poland’s leaders and
thinkers, the flower of Polish intelligentsia…to hardened
Communists they were class enemies and, therefore, enemies
of the Soviet Union.”
After months of interrogations and attempted
indoctrination, they were put on trains under the false
impression that they were being returned to Poland. From
the trains, they were transferred to prison buses which
drove them into remote areas of the Russian forest, where
they were bound, shot in the back of the head and thrown
into mass graves.
In 1941, Nazi Germany turned against its
Communist ally and invaded the Soviet Union. Subsequently,
the Soviet Union attempted to blame the Katyn Massacre on
the Germans.
The Soviet Union only admitted guilt in
1989 after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Almost Worse Than Genocide
During the memorial, one young man
said: “The massacre at Katyn was a crime that was
almost worse than genocide. Rather than trying to exterminate
all the Polish, they tried to destroy their cultural and
intellectual elite, thus facilitating the imposition of
an anti-natural lifestyle that is at the core of communist
ideology.”
His point calls to mind a fact that after
the fall of the Iron Curtain is not popular to vocalize.
Communism is a parasitic evil that saps the life blood from
the civilizations upon which it preys. The history of communism
in Cambodia, Russia and China demonstrate the extent of
this truth.
Unfortunately, the world has never publicly
acknowledged this evil. There was never a Nuremberg trial
to call the perpetrators of Communism to task. Therefore,
it is important that events like this memorial ceremony take
place.
When memorials are forgotten, history
threatens to repeat itself. Is this happening today? Far
from dying, Communism continues to live. A large part of
the world still lives under its yoke and Russian President
Vladimir Putin continues to lament the fall of the Soviet
Empire.2
This is incomprehensible. Communism should
not be lamented, but publicly repudiated as one of the greatest
errors of modern history. Only then will its rebound be
certainly averted.
This is the true value of the Katyn
Memorial in Baltimore. As the event’s organizers stated,
by spreading awareness of these tragedies, the risk of their
recurring is lessened. Therefore, the victims of Katyn must
not be forgotten. Their remembrance strengthens the will
to resist and neutralizes Communism’s desire to kill
that will in individuals and nations.
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