Posted on by bugsy122019

Shouldn’t we learn from the past? Maybe not🤨

Last April, I wrote the following blog about the 81st anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, in which the Soviet Army murdered 20,000 Polish military officers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, priests and intellectuals, leaving them in shallow graves. Who would have thought that on the 82d anniversary of the Katyn Massacre we would be horrified at another Russian massacre. This time, with the use of aerial photography, we can see that up to 10,000 men, women and children have been left in a shallow grave in the outskirts of Mariupol–to say nothing of the hundreds of others who have been killed in Buchi, Irpin, and too many other towns.

Why? Initially President Putin told his people that it was because Russia wanted to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine (interesting when you remember that President Zelenskyy is Jewish.) Then it was to free Ukraine from oppression. (There’s plenty of oppression in Russia–maybe deal with that first? Just a thought.) Finally this week a Russian general in charge of the southern front made it clear that the goal of the Russian government is to take all of southern Ukraine–from Crimea, Donbas and Luhansk to Odessa and on toward Moldova. I have the horrible feeling that we are headed to World War II 2.0 being played out in Ukraine. It’s worth rereading the Katyn Massacre to remember what happens in this magnitude of warfare.

(Because of the graphic photos, there will be not pictures in the blog.)

Most of us know that Germany attacked Poland from the east on September 1, 1939. Just 16 days later, because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the west. It’s difficult to know how many Poles were initially captured by the Soviets–estimates go between 250,000 and 455,000 men. In a relatively short time, many escaped and others were allowed to leave after interrogations, but by November 1939, Laeventia Beria, head of the Russian NKVD (precurser of the KGB) held about 40,000 men in prisons around Kozelsk and Karkiv,(sound familiar?) inside the USSR. On March 5, 1940, Stalin agreed with Beria, and they, with six other members of the Politburo, signed execution orders for over 25,000 “counter-revolutionaries.” During April and May, members of the Polish military, pilots, government officials, police, lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, writers, journalists, large landowners and priests were killed, and thrown into unmarked graves, most of them in the Katyn Forest. Stalin hoped to get rid of individuals who could oppose the Soviet Union at the end of the war.

The “fog of war” regarding the missing Poles continued until June 1941, when Germany turned on its “friend” with Operation Barbarossa–the attempt to take over the Soviet Union. Despite their recent war with the Soviets, the Polish government-in-exile in London headed by President Wladyslaw Sikorski, signed the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement against Germany. The government-in-exile expected that the Polish POWs held in Russians would be released and fight with the Polish government. Sikorski asked Stalin where they were. The answer was that they had escapes, and the Russians had “lost track” of them, but they were probably in Manchuria. No one believed that, but the Soviets insisted that they simply didn’t know anything else.

However, when Germany pushed deep into the USSR around Smolensk in April 1943 they found a mass grave of thousands of men. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and closed confident, was thrilled. He could tell the British, French, Poles in exile, and Americans that their ally, Stalin, had killed thousands of Poles. He brought in members of the “Katyn Commission” of the International Red Cross (IRC), with 12 forensic examiners, and even a number of Allied POWs, to examine the site. Now Sikorski demanded an explanation. Stalin replied that the Germans had actually massacred the Poles, and then cut all diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile. Throughout the rest of the war, Stalin maintained that it was Germany which had massacred the Poles, regardless of the IRC’s extensive information.

In 1952, the US conducted a congressional enquiry about Katyn. It, too, found that the massacre had be done by the Soviets, but very little was said or done about it. And after the war, when Poland came under the controlled by the Kremlin, little more was said about it . . . in public. But behind closed doors, and among the Polish diaspora people continued to ask questions about what happened in the Katyn forest.

Over the decades, the questions of the massacre festered under the surface. In the 1970s, the Flying University in Poland, and the Workers Defense Committee started openly asking questions. Despite arrests and beatings, more and more people demanded that the documents be unsealed. In 1981, Solidarity took a significant step when it set up a Katyn memorial. The Polish Communist Party took it down, but every Zaduszki Day (All Souls Day) Poles would set up crosses with the same silent questions. Not until 1989, when real cracks appeared throughout the Warsaw Pact, did the USSR admit that Stalin had authorized the massacre. The following years, Mikhail Gorbachov explained that Stalin had agreed with Beria and had authorized the NKVD to exterminate so many of Poland’s elite. That year, the Kremlin also turned over a number of formerly top-secret documents to the Polish President, Lech Walesa.

Even so, it was another 20 years before Russia finally provided Poland with 81 volumes of material, though they still hold 35 more volumes of classified documents. On the 70th anniversary of the Massacre, the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, and the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended a memorial service near the actual site. Yet, to this day, there are still many, many questions to be answered

Posted on by bugsy122019

Review of THE VOLUNTEER

Captain Witold Pilecki

I’ve been a military historian for 45 years, and in that time I’ve read only a handful of books as powerful as Jack Fairweather’s The Volunteer—the story of Captain Witold Pilecki, who fought in the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1920). During the inter-war years he rebuilt his family’s property that was destroyed in World War I, and became an important leader of the community. He also was a reserve officer in the Polish 19th Infantry Division that was called up on August 26, 1939. On September 1, 1939, the Germans started barreling east toward Warsaw, and 17 days later the Soviets lumbered west toward the Vistula. Poland surrendered on September 28, 1939, and the Government went into exile in Great Britain.

At that point, most men tried to return to their families. However Fairweather suggests Pilecki held a different perspective. As much as he loved his wife and children, he also loved his country and he felt that he had an inner duty to defend it. So rather than going home, Pilecki and a friend set up the Secret Polish Army in Warsaw. The following spring, Pilecki entered discussions with the more mainstream Underground Home Army. Early that summer, the Underground began hearing that an old Polish Army barrack in the town of Oswiecim—the Germans called it Auschwitz—was being used as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners. The Underground wanted to find out what was going on there, and if possible to set up an Underground cell. Though several members suggested it to Pilecki, no one would order anyone to go on such a dangerous mission. Witold thought long and hard but ultimately concluded that he would do what was right. On September 18, 1940, he packed a few belonging and calmly waited for the German raid that the Underground knew was on its way. That started a 2 1/2 year odyssey into the hell that was Auschwitz.

Using memoirs, diaries, letters, books, interviews, newly-opened papers from the post-Polish communist archives and, most fascinatingly, Witold’s own information smuggled out of the camp to the Underground, Fairweather has described Pilecki’s astonishing journey. The starvation, torture, beatings, freezing winters, and rampant disease became routine. Slowly he built a small Underground. Their most important work was keeping meticulous records of when people entered the camp, and when and how they died. Very occasionally family members managed to pay for a Polish prisoner to be released. Whenever possible they took the information out of the camp with them and managed to get it to the Home Army. From there couriers would get it to the Polish Government-in-Exile in Britain. Initially the Government could not believe what was happening in the camp. It was far fetched. They needed corroboration. Pilecki and his Underground had to be exaggerating. And then came the Final Solution.

Pilecki and the other inmates were set to building new barracks, infirmaries, other odd buildings and crematoria. Then came the trains—first a trickle, then a stream and then a floodgate. The Underground also learned about Zyklon B—the gas used to exterminate millions of people. The Underground continued keeping records, periodically getting it to Warsaw and on to London. By now it had become clear that Palecki’s information was correct and the Government-in-Exile was trying to convince the Allies to bomb Auschwitz.

By spring of 1943, Pilecki concluded that there was little more he could do in Auschwitz. He’d barely survived typhus, and knew that he simply wouldn’t last much longer. He had the same internal discussion that he’d had before volunteering for the camp, and ultimately decided that he could do more with the Home Army then in the camp. He and two friends made their escape an on August 25 Pilecki was back with the Home Army in Warsaw. One of his first tasks was to put together what is called Witold’s Report—an extremely accurate paper providing the number of people who arrived at Auschwitz, and those who were killed.

In November 1943, Pilecki became part of the secret anti-Soviet unit of the Home Army, the NIE, for it was clear that the Soviets had their eyes on Poland. Soviets, Bolsheviks—to Pilecki communists were communists. He’s fought them before and he would do it again. And if there had been any doubts about the Soviets, the fact that they patiently waited just across the Vistula in August and September 1944, allowing the Germans to destroy what was left of Warsaw made it crystal clear. Rather than being taken by the Soviets at the end of the Warsaw Uprising, Pilecki surrendered to the Germans, and was finally liberated by the US 12th Armored division in April 1945.

As soon as he was liberated, Pilecki joined the Intelligence Division of the the Polish II Corp then based in Italy under General Anders. During his down-time, he began a book on his time in Auschwitz. Sadly, toward the end of the war, Poland came under Soviet jurisdiction. However, for the time being the Polish Forces-in-Exile carried on. Anders ordered Pilecki to return to Warsaw to report on the Soviet situation. He arrived in Warsaw in December 1945 and started to put together an intelligence network. Apparently someone informed on him in the summer of 1946. Though Anders told him to leave, Pilecki refused and continued to provide intelligence to the Forces-in-Exile until he was arrested on May 8, 1947. He was interrogated and tortured for months, but refused to give up any serious information. On March 3, 1948, the first show trial began—he was presented with a whole host of charges, and sentenced to death on May 15. Witold Pilecki was shot ten days later.

The show trial was just a part of the campaign to replace the Home Army and the Government-in-Exile with the Lublin, or Polish People’s Republic. Immediately after the fall of the communist Poland in 1990, Pilecki and hundreds of others were rehabilitated. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta and the order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish decoration. As Fairweather has shown us throughout the volume, Pilecki looked beyond himself, his family and friends, and tried to do what was needed for his country. It is a fascinating, horrifying, and ultimately an uplifting book that adds Witold Pilecki to the Polish Pantheon with Kazimierz Pulaski, Tadeusz Kosciusko and Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

This coming Monday, January 27, will be the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Only those who were there can possibly understand what happened, but it is imperative that we remember.