Remember the Deaths of Poland’s Leaders: Call Katyn Its True Name

Good can come out of the tragic deaths of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Poland’s top military and political leaders in the plane crash at the airfield in Smolensk.

Seventy years ago, genocide was committed. It is time to name what was done accurately to honor those slaughtered long ago and to fulfill the act of remembrance that brought Poland’s leaders to their untimely death at Smolensk.

In early April 1940, 20,000 Polish prisoners of war, among them Polish intelligentsia and top military officers, were shot by the Soviet NKVD, with Stalin’s approval.

No one has been punished for what happened at Katyn.

The graves of the Katyn Forest Massacre were discovered by the Germans in 1943. Thousands of other soldiers had been murdered in nearby camps and prisons, and Katyn has become the symbolic memorial site.

The Soviets blamed everything on the Nazis and thus denied their involvement. The West, including Britain and the United States, had secretly agreed that the crimes were committed by the Soviets, but the official version continued the lie of German guilt.

The alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II, and the Cold War that followed, made the massacre an untouchable subject for the world.

In Poland, things were even worse. The pro-Soviet propaganda covered up the crimes, and one could get arrested for even hinting at any Russian involvement in the killings. And so Katyn remained taboo in Poland until the fall of communism in 1989.

In 1990, Russia for the first time acknowledged its responsibility for the massacre, as well as for the cover-up, but stopped short of calling it genocide. As a result, no one has been punished for what happened, and the victims’ families have yet to receive any sort of compensation.

Recently, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became the first Russian leader to join Poles in commemorating the victims of Katyn. It is an irony of fate that Lech Kaczynski and Poland’s other top leaders died on their way to Katyn for the ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the massacre.

The renowned Solidarity leader and Poland’s former president Lech Walesa was wrong when he called the accident the second Katyn, despite the obvious analogies: In both tragedies, Poland lost its brightest minds on Russian territory, around Katyn. A plane crash, however, is not a war crime, and therefore should not be compared to one.

But now the world needs to remember the atrocities that occurred at Katyn, and Poland, with the world’s support, must fight harder for justice.

Russia, out of simple justice and to come to terms with the crimes of Soviet communism, needs to acknowledge the 1940 massacre as indeed genocide, just as the Germans have acknowledged the Holocaust.

Soviet officers who participated in the killings and are still alive should be held to account in a war crimes tribunal. The Russian government should offer compensation to the members of the victims’ families.

And Putin should not be praised for calling the execution of 20,000 people “a political crime.” The plane crash was not another Katyn, but it will hopefully open the door to, at last, calling Katyn by its true name—genocide.

Ewa Bronowicz is a writer living in New York City.