THE KATYN MASSACRE: How history affects your own fate...

Today I read a report on something that happened during WWII that made me stop and think. The report probably only makes an impact on people like me who know history, study history and care about what happened in history and especially those Polish-Americans who’s lives were affected by specific acts of history before, during and after WWII.

World War II began with the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany from the West.  At the same time, Soviet Russia attacked Poland from the East; a deal was made between Hitler and Stalin to divvy Poland up.

My parents lived in the eastern part of Poland and were arrested and shipped off to a Siberian labor camp by the Soviets and here is where the modern history of my immediate family and ultimately my own fate, began.

Stalin and his fellow Communist had a grand plan of spreading their brand of dictatorial Communism throughout the world just as Hitler dreamt of his superior Aryan master race ruling over the entire world.

Stalin knew that to begin his domination of the world, he needed to occupy Poland and turn it into a Communist state. He knew that Poland, a historic foe of Russia, had a rebellious spirit of independence and had to be subdued quickly and one way to accomplish that was to eliminate all Poles that were capable of leading a rebellion against Communist domination.

Since the conquest of Poland by Hitler and Stalin was swift, some 22,000 Polish officers were captured by the Soviets. These officers were the crème de la crème of Polish society; doctors, lawyers, engineers, business leaders and generally known as the intelligencia; young men that could and would present a challenge to Stalin’s plan of Soviet domination of Poland…and so he executed each officer with a single bullet to the head and buried them in the KATYN Forest, west of Smolensk, Russia.

Hitler decided or always knew that he did not want a co-ruler of the world and so he turned on Stalin and invaded Russia. Stalin now turned to the allies for help and was welcomed with open arms by FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) of the U.S. and Winston Churchill of Great Britain.

As the war progressed, the Germans came upon the bodies of the 22,ooo Polish officers in the KATYN FOREST and hoping to drive a wedge between Russia and its newly allied partners, presented evidence that the Russians committed the massacre…Stalin denied it and blamed the Germans.

Recently released government documents show that FDR and his administration knew that the Russians were to blame for the massacre as early as 1943 but chose to dismiss the information, not wanting to stir things up with Stalin who they were counting on to help them win the war against Germany and Japan.

Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the Soviet’s guilt in 1990.

Here is the problem I and many others have with this information even though we suspected that FDR knew the truth all along; why was FDR and for that matter, Churchill, willing to condemn millions of people to slavery under the Soviets for more that 50 years after the war, knowing what Stalin was capable of?

Some say that FDR and Churchill feared Stalin and just gave into his demands as the most expedient thing to do even though giving into his demands produced a protracted Cold War.

FDR, who died in 1945, may have been scared to challenge Stalin but yet in 1950 we challenged North Korea and China in the Korean War…but under a different president (Truman).

Our history books praise FDR and Churchill as WWII heroes and do not portray them as men that betrayed and sold millions of people into Soviet slavery but their actions, for better or worst, changed the course of history and with it the countless lives of future generations.

Should they have stood up to Stalin? What a question…

My own history and that of my siblings and countless Poles that instead of going back to Poland, made their way to the U.S., Canada, Mexico, South America, South Africa, Australia and countless other countries to start new lives there vowing always to return to their homeland once it was free of Soviet domination…unfortunately or fortunately for most of them, the journey back was never made because liberation from Soviet rule just came too late.

Poles in the Polish Diaspora, prospered and so did their children but many of the Poles stuck in now Soviet occupied Poland did not. Many of those Poles in Poland were relatives of those who now lived elsewhere in the world. I remember sending countless aid packages to my relatives left behind but ironically, those that were sent to Siberian labor camps like my parents, were, at that time, not considered the lucky ones but those destined to suffer and die at the hands of the Soviets, far, far from home.

Talk about fate…

We can never change history but we can make sure that history is reported in the most factual way possible and these newly released reports will cause historians all over to rethink and maybe rewrite some history books, shedding new light on what really happened and not what leaders at that time wanted us to think happened…and maybe, knowing the truth, we may learn something from that history…and maybe that knowledge will guide our hands in the future…for the better.

If you get a chance, see the movie KATYN to see the whole story portrayed on film...