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The Glory of Poland By ROGER COHEN Published: April 12, 2010 NEW YORK — My first thought, hearing of the Polish tragedy, was that history’s gyre can be of an unbearable cruelty, decapitating Poland’s elite twice in the same cursed place, Katyn. My second was to call my old friend Adam Michnik in Warsaw. Michnik, an intellectual imprisoned six times by the former puppet-Soviet Communist rulers, once told me: “Anyone who has suffered that humiliation, at some level, wants revenge. I know all the lies. I saw people being killed. But I also know that revanchism is never ending. And...

President Kaczynski’s last speech 12.04.2010 11:53 Below is the text of the speech which Lech Kaczynski, who died on Saturday, was going to deliver at the 70th anniversary ceremony of the Katyn massacre. “Dear Representatives of the Katyn Families. Ladies and Gentlemen. In April 1940 over twenty-one thousand Polish prisoners from the NKVD camps and prisons were killed. The genocide was committed at Stalin’s will and at the Soviet Union’s highest authority’s command. The alliance between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and the Soviet attack on Poland on 17 September 1939 reached a terrifying climax...

Of course it’s not like Russia will now agree to stop building the Nord Stream gas pipeline or Poland will lift its objections to it; or that a new gas agreement between the two countries will be signed after more than a year of delay. Katyn victims may not necessarily be put on a fast track in Moscow toward rehabilitation, and the question of how Russia sees its sphere of influence and how Poland wants to compete with it will come back sooner or later. But in the wake of the unthinkable the Polish-Russian relationship has reached its highest level...

There is no such thing as a good death. Every tragic death is senseless and aimless. But today Poles can bring some sense to this unprecedented tragedy in their country's history. For the last 70 years, the name Katyn had little resonance for most people in the west. It was also seen as a symbol of Russophobia on the part of Poles. Paradoxically, what happened on Saturday in Smolensk makes this notion obsolete. Due to last weekend's tragedy, the killing of 22,000 Polish officers by Russians in 1940 will become common knowledge. We Poles do remember that, but because they...

WARSAW — As the body of Poland’s president was returned to this traumatized capital on Sunday, a day after he and dozens of top Polish political and military leaders died in a plane crash in western Russia, the country was in mourning but there was already a sense that its young democracy had passed a major test. The mechanisms to replace the lost officials appeared to be functioning and the political culture was responding with remarkable unity. Senior Polish officials sought to reassure the public that the government would continue to function normally despite the loss. Military leaders were immediately...

CHICAGO (AP) -- One of Wojciech Seweryn's main passions in life was reminding people of the Katyn massacre, a 1940 slaughter that killed thousands of Polish military officials, including his own father. It was that passion that ultimately led to the 70-year-old Chicago sculptor's death. Seweryn, a respected artist in the Chicago area's large Polish community, was among the 97 people killed Saturday when the airliner carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski crashed in western Russia.

High ranking officials are gathering in Russia’s Smolensk region following the tragic crash of the plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and many of the Polish political elite, with no passengers surviving. Following the crash, Russia’s Emergencies Ministry opened a crisis hot line for relatives of the victims. English speaking emergency specialists can be reached at +7 (495) 626 37 07. The Smolensk region has set up a separate hot line: +7 (800) 100 19 01. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has arrived in Smolensk to personally supervise the investigation. According to Polish media reports, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk...

Russia took some tentative steps along the rocky road to reconciliation with Poland when Vladimir Putin attended ceremonies to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre. The Russian prime minister, who was the first Russian leader to take part in formal events commemorating the massacre, laid flowers at the memorial in western Russia to the estimated 22,000 Polish officers and civilians murdered by Stalin’s NKVD in April 1940. With the Soviet Union long denying its guilt over the massacre, and Russia frustrating Poland with its apparent failure to show any contrition over Katyn, during a speech at the ceremony...

The Woods of Smolensk The Polish President and numerous top officials died aboard a TU-154 while trying to land at Smolensk airbase.He was on his way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre which took place in the woods near that city. ... After Poland went down before the onslaught of Nazi and Soviet forces in 1939-40, Joseph Stalin and Lavrenty Beria decided to decapitate the country’s society. Since the Polish army required all university graduates to become reserve officers, the NKVD decided to kill two birds with one stone and eliminate the both the trained military manpower...

In a ground-breaking move Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk for the first time have jointly commemorated the victims of the Katyn massacre 70 years ago. The event signals a reconciliation from which other countries may learn, writes the European press. Commemoration brings countries closer In a ground-breaking move Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk for the first time have jointly commemorated the victims of the Katyn massacre 70 years ago. | Photo: rian Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his Russian colleague Vladimir Putin’s joint commemoration is a breakthrough...

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday became the first Russian or Soviet leader to join Polish officials in commemorating the anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II. Mr. Putin cast the executions as one tragedy out of many wrought by what he called the Soviet Union’s “totalitarian regime.” “We bow our heads to those who bravely met death here,” Mr. Putin said at a site in the Katyn forest close to the Russian city of Smolensk, where 70 years ago members of the Soviet...

Giant Katyn memorial to be built in Poland. The memorial is supposed to consist of a tall monument, and an „army” of 21.857 natural size statues of soldiers – the number equal to the number of the Polish POWs murdered by the Soviets in Katyn. Something like the Chinese ancient Terracota Army. Each statue will have its first name, surname, military rank and ... a hole in the head. Computer visualisation of the memorial A video visualisation http://video.google.pl/videoplay?docid=5291651615159379765&q=source:008264069519938250476&hl=pl#

KATYN, Russia (Reuters) - A senior Polish bishop said Saturday Poland must forgive Russia for Soviet crimes in order to improve relations, speaking at a graveyard of more than 4,000 Polish officers killed by Josef Stalin's army in 1940. Russia and Poland are at loggerheads over the actions of Soviet leader Stalin in 1939, when he clinched a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for the invasion of Poland and world war. "The fate of those killed is already in the hands of God," Tadeusz Ploski, a Catholic Polish army bishop, told a group of 250 prison...

Musical tribute to Katyn Rock musician Pawel Kukiz, leader of the band Piersi, has commemorated the victims of the Katyn massacre. Kukiz recorded the song, along with several others, as a form of expressing the truth rather than the falsification of history by presenting certain facts. Below is our English language translation of the song and see the video, too. 17 September (by Pawel Kukiz) A hen, not a bird, Poland – not abroad* So pour the vodka, Grisha, Because once you shoot, In the back of the head, It’s to the trench. Bodies thrown on bodies, Sasha, you must...

Katyn showed "great chauvinism" 18.09.2009 10:34 President Lech Kaczynski called the massacre of Polish officers in Katyn “an act of Russian chauvinism.” Thursday, during a speech to commemorate the Soviet invasion of Poland 70 years ago, President Lech Kaczynski said that the massacre of Polish officers in Katyn was a revenge for the defeat of Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet War in 1920. Kaczynski called Katyn “an act of Russian chauvinism,” which, in his opinion, prevailed in the Soviet Union at the end of 1930s. In his speech at the Memorial of Those Murdered in the East of Poland in Warsaw,...

‘Katyn was not like the Holocaust’ 02.09.2009 11:48 A German Jewish group has said that President Kaczynski’s likening the 1940 Katyn massacre to the Holocaust was “inappropriate”. “Despite total understanding of the pain caused by the memory of Polish officers murdered in Katyn, the comparison is inappropriate and out of place,” said Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan Kramer, quoted in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. President Kaczynski referred to the massacre of over 22,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 in his speech commemorating the outbreak of WW II. “Though not comparable in...

Katyn victims in Kharkov were ‘limed’ 10.08.2009 12:10 Secret NKVD documents reveal that thousands of Katyn massacre victims executed in Kharkov were later covered with lime to conceal traces of mass murder. A letter, branded ‘top secret,’ has recently been found by the Ukrainian Security Service in post-Soviet archives. It reads: “In a forest about 100 metres from Kharkov-Bilgorod road, within a 50-metre radius, are many spots of collapsed earth. The holes are rectangular, 3x6 metres. One of the holes has been dug out and human bones and skulls can be seen. Some of the bones are scattered on the...

There's a Polish joke that goes something like this: "A Russian and German turn up in town. Who do you shoot first?" Answer: "The German, because business comes before pleasure." Between 1939 and 1945 three million Polish Catholics (as well as three million Polish Jews) were murdered by the two most evil regimes to rule mankind. Of those, the Russians murdered a million, the vast majority prisoners or civilians. This is the story of 20,000 of them: the officers, policemen and intellectuals who were captured by the Soviets in September 1939 and murdered with a bullet to the head at...

Efforts to gain justice for thousands of Polish captives executed apparently at Stalin's orders have been rebuffed by Russia's courts. The country's mood has swung away from probing the Soviet past.Reporting from Mednoye, Russia — There were 6,295 Polish prisoners held captive at the monastery when the order came to "unload" the camp. It took a month and a half to kill all of them. The prisoners were mostly military officers, police, gendarmes and landlords, rounded up as a dangerous "bourgeois" elite when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in the run-up to World War II. The following year, 1940,...

"Katyn", a recent Polish movie production about the mass genocide of Polish elites by the Soviet NKVD at Stalin's personal order, is well-received in Italy. The Italian Prime Minister himself encouraged world leaders present at the NATO summit to see the picture. Although the movie received so many good reviews, the company distributing copies of the movie to cinemas across the country is complaining they encounter serious prejudice and hostility. Martio Mazarotto of the company said in an interview that the world of culture and also of distribution of movies within Italy is almost monopolized by extreme leftists, for whom...