Liquidate the Problem
The Crime of Katyn : Facts and Documents. (The Polish Cultural Foundation, 37s. 6d.)
THE preoccupation of war and limitations of censorship prevented the British public from grasping at the time the enormity of the mass crime of Katyn Forest. Whilst the broad facts have become known since, the details have still passed many by. With this thought in mind, the Polish Cultural Foundation has now published a volume of massive documentation on the Katyn massacre.
The agreed facts are clear. In April 1943 the Germans discovered the bodies of over 4,000 Polish officers in mass graves in Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. Because the Red Cross could not secure Soviet agreement, the Germans set up their own commission, whose report stated that most of the victims had been shot in the back of the neck, apparently on the brink of the mass graves. The German-instigated report also said that the clothing on many bodies carried cigarette packets bearing the inscription `Kozielsk' —the last Russian prisoner-of-war camp where the majority of the executed officers had been imprisoned. The clothing also contained letters, diaries and newspapers covering the period August 1939 and April 1940. Subsequently, the
Soviet government broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile because of the Polish insistence upon a Red Cross inquiry, and proceeded, first, to set up an exclusively Rus- sian commission, and later to establish the rival Lublin committee, the predecessor of the Polish Communist regime. The Russian commission, reporting in January 1944, after the Katyn area had been recaptured, claimed the dead Polish officers had been in camps overrun by the German advance in 1941 and that they had been murdered by the Germans. Significantly, the issue of the mass crime was sidestepped at Nuremberg. although many of the allegedly guilty Germans were available. Moreover, there is every probability that somewhere in the USSR there are at least two other `Katyns' where the `elimination' of the 10,000 remaining officers of the 1939 Polish officer corps in Soviet hands took place.
The Polish Cultural Foundation collates all the available evidence from fragments of descrip- tion by men who subsequently died at Katyn, and of their lives as Russian prisoners, with such documentary evidence as is available of what actually happened. This book, which complements J. K. Zawodny's study of Katyn, Deaths in the Forest, leaves little doubt that the NKVD were responsible. Yet it is more than another indict- ment of the Soviet Union—its real message is a devastating condemnation of any tyranny, whether it is Fascist or Communist. As I read the pages I could not avoid another thought : in all the records of the black deeds of Western imperialism there is nothing remotely to equal Katyn; and Katyn is only one example of what totalitarians can do.
DESMOND DONNELLY
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