Katyn Remembered

Mary and I joined other civic heads at Cannock Chase at the memorial designed to remember 14,000 Polish who were killed by the Soviets in 1940.

It was a moving ceremony and one that was very cold and very wet. We later travelled back to the Polish catholic Club in Wolverhampton to have a cup of tea with the Wolverhampton Polish community.

This is what Wikpedia says about the Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest Massacre and the Katyn Incident (Polish: Katyń), was a mass execution of Polish citizens by the order of Soviet authorities in 1940.[1] Estimates of the number of Polish citizens executed at three mass-murder sites in the spring of 1940 range from some 1,803 [2] through 14,540[3][4],and through 21,857 [1] to 27,700.[5] Most of those killed were reserve officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Polish September Campaign, but the dead also included many civilians who had been arrested for being "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials".[6] Since Poland's conscription system required every unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer,[7] the Soviets were thus able to round up much of the Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belarusian intelligentsias of Polish citizenship.

The term "Katyn massacre" originally referred to the massacre, at Katyn Forest, near the village of Gnezdovo, near Smolensk, Russia, of Polish military officers confined at the Kozelsk prisoner-of-war camp. The term subsequently came to be applied also to the execution of prisoners of war held at Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps,[4] and political prisoners in West Belarus and West Ukraine,[5] shot on Stalin's orders at Katyn Forest, at the NKVD (Narodny Kommisariat Vnutrennikh Del) Smolensk headquarters and at an abattoir in that same city,[1] and at prisons in Kalinin (Tver), Kharkiv, Moscow and other Soviet cities.[6]

The 1943 discovery of mass graves at Katyn Forest by Germany, after its armed forces had occupied the site in 1941, precipitated a 1943 rupture of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London. The Soviet Union continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it acknowledged that the NKVD had in fact committed the massacres and the subsequent cover-up.[8] The Russian government has admitted Soviet responsibility for the massacres, however it does not classify them a war crime or an act of genocide, which would have necessitated the prosecution of surviving perpetrators, as Polish government requests.[3] Some Russians continue to believe the original propaganda cover story that was maintained by the Soviet government until 1989, that it had been the Germans who had killed the Poles after invading the Soviet Union in mid-1941.[1]