The conscience of the world cries out for a testimony of truth: Remembering the Katyn massacre 80 years on - Emerging Europe | Intelligence, Community, News
Arkady Rzegocki Polish Ambassador to the UK
“The conscience of the world cries out for a testimony of truth,†says the inscription on the Katyn monument at the Gunnersbury Cemetery in London, the very first such monument in Western Europe commemorating the victims of the Katyn massacre, unveiled in the autumn of 1976. On the 80th anniversary of the Katyn execution and the 10th anniversary of the Smolensk air disaster, in memory of those killed, we should all bear witness to the truth.
In the spring of 1940, nearly 22,000 Polish citizens, including 15,000 Polish officers, were killed by the NKVD, pursuant to a decision by the USSR’s highest authorities. In violation of all international rights, thousands of Poles incarcerated in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps were considered to be enemies of the Soviet Union, murdered, and buried in the Katyn forest near Smolensk.
This genocide, later called the Katyn Massacre, was only part of a wider operation aimed at liquidating the Polish elites, agreed on in September 1939. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, two totalitarian regimes, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, attacked Poland and divided its territory between themselves. For the two following years, the two aggressors collaborated closely in the destruction of the Polish elites and the Polish resistance.
Read more at: https://emerging-europe.com/voices/the-conscience-of-the-world-cries-out-for-a-testimony-of-truth-remembering-the-katyn-massacre-80-years-on/
This too, around 80 years ago, April 7th seems to be the anniversary.
