The Katyn scar

In the spring of 1940, the Soviets exterminated the flower of the Polish intelligentsia without any legal proceedings. Today, the Russian authorities want to treat this crime as an ordinary offence subject to the statute of limitations.

.Józef Dróbka’s friends last saw him at the railway station in Bydgoszcz. He told his family that he was well and would return home as soon as possible. He was one of the thousands of Poles who were mobilised in the late summer of 1939 to protect their homeland from the German attack. But on 17 September, in the third week of the war, another powerful enemy struck from the east: the Red Army. Dróbka was one of the captives taken by the Soviets.

From the beginning of the war, the two totalitarian regimes – united at the time by a pact, despite their ideological differences – instilled terror in the conquered Polish lands. To this day, the chimneys of Auschwitz and other extermination camps, as well as the death pits at mass execution sites, such as Palmiry or Piaśnica, serve as haunting reminders of the bloody German occupation. The word ‘Katyn’, on the other hand, is most closely and inextricably associated with the brutal Soviet occupation.

‘It’s a sad day. We have no news of what’s happening at home,’ wrote one of the Polish prisoners on Christmas Eve of 1939 in the Soviet camp at Kozielsk. That was where, along with Starobielsk, Polish Army officers were imprisoned. Policemen, gendarmes, prison guards, Border Protection Corps and Border Guard officers (including Józef Dróbka) were mostly sent to Ostashkov. The prisons of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine – as the Soviets called the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic illegally annexed by the USSR – were also rapidly filling up with Polish patriots.

The fate of these people was sealed in early March 1940. In a memo to Joseph Stalin, Lavrenty Beria, the head of the infamous NKVD, proposed executing 14,700 Polish POWs and 11,000 prisoners without trial. He argued that these people were ‘declared enemies of the Soviet power, unlikely to ever improve’.

There was a certain logic to this diabolical argument. The people Beria wanted to exterminate had served the Polish state faithfully for the two preceding decades and were certainly not ready to accept the loss of independence.

Dróbka enlisted in the Polish Army far back in 1920. As a member of the 17th Greater Poland Uhlan Regiment, he took part in the war against the Bolsheviks, who wanted to bring their bloody revolution to Europe ‘over the corpse of white Poland’. When the invasion was successfully repelled and peace returned, Dróbka served in the Customs Guard and then the Border Guard. ‘Committed, dutiful, diligent, he performs his duties with devotion,’ reads his superior’s report. In 1939, Dróbka worked in the staff team of the headquarters of the Border Guard District “Chojnice”. He lived in a three-room flat with his wife and three children. This stability was ended by the war.

‘There were tears, but also the hope of a quick return,’ his grandson Zdzisław wrote years later, describing the moment his grandfather parted with his close ones. The Dróbek family, like many of their compatriots, believed that Poland’s Western allies, France and Great Britain, would come to the country’s aid. But this did not happen – not in September 1939, not in the following months.

Meanwhile, Stalin and his closest collaborators approved Beria’s malevolent proposal. On 3 April 1940, the ‘unloading’ of the Polish POW camps in the USSR began. The Kozielsk inmates were taken to Katyn near Smolensk and massacred. The prisoners from Starobelsk were killed in Kharkiv, while those from Ostashkov were slaughtered in the cellars of the NKVD office in Kalinin (now Tver).

‘The executions would start in the evening and end at dawn,’ Dmitri Tokariev, head of the Kalinin Regional Directorate of the NKVD in 1940, later testified. He explained that in one of the rooms, a prisoner’s personal details were checked before they were handcuffed and taken to a death cell. There, the victim was killed by a shot to the back of the head. The bodies were loaded onto trucks and transported each morning to a location near the village of Mednoye, where a pit for 250 corpses had been prepared on the outskirts of the wood. Józef Dróbka, who was murdered on 27 April, must also have made this final journey.

Simultaneously, Polish prisoners were also exterminated in Kyiv, Minsk, and various other places. Today, the Soviet murder of Poles in the spring of 1940 is commonly referred to as the Katyn Massacre. It has claimed the lives of at least 21,768 people.

There is a valid reason behind our statement that the flower of the Polish intelligentsia was killed at Katyn. The list of victims includes high-ranking officers of the Polish Army and other uniformed services, as well as priests and civilians such as doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and officials. Moreover, Soviet repression encompassed the families of the deceased, who were relocated deep into the USSR to the so-called ‘inhuman land’.

The truth about the Katyn Massacre was to be kept forever in secret. But in April 1943, the Germans – after being at war with the Soviets for almost two years and successfully pushing further eastward – publicly revealed the discovery of the bodies of Polish officers at Katyn. They invited the International Medical Commission to the scene. Although they had committed no less horrific crimes, also covering up their evidence, they had a vested interest in exposing the Katyn Massacre.

Stalin denied the accusations. The Soviet authorities established a commission of their own, known as the Burdenka’s Commission. The war was still raging when its members concluded that the Katyn Massacre had been committed in 1941 by the Germans. The allegation was later repeated in the indictment against the key German war criminals tried at Nuremberg. Thus, the Katyn lie was born and strengthened.

For the next several decades, it persisted not only in the Soviet Union but also in all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe which found themselves in the USSR’s sphere of influence at the end of the Second World War. The communist government in Poland, brought to power by the Soviet bayonets, was also founded upon the Katyn lie. Anyone who tried to spread the truth about the massacre or, indeed, uncover it, faced severe repression.

For a long time, Józef Dróbka’s relatives did not know what had happened to him. The Municipal Court in Chojnice declared him dead a few years after the war, setting the date of his death as 9 May 1946. ‘My family made only short, vague comments or said nothing at all,’ Zdzisław Dróbka recalls. In 1963, his grandmother presented him with his grandfather’s button adorned with the Polish eagle. ‘Take it and look for him,’ she said. But the search for Józef Dróbka, both in Poland and abroad, yielded no results.

It was only in April 1990, in a wave of glasnost, that the Soviet authorities admitted that the Katyn Massacre was one of the ‘grave crimes of Stalinism’. That same year, the Dróbek family learned that Józef was likely held captive in Ostashkov and murdered in Kalinin. The information was later confirmed. In 1993, Zdziław Dróbka visited Mednoye to erect a cross at the spot where his grandfather was killed and collect soil from there. A dozen years later, he planted an Oak of Remembrance for him at the Central Border Guard Training Centre in Koszalin.

Katyn is an important part of Polish history and memory. The trauma that Poles carry from the events of 84 years ago was deepened by the tragedy that occurred fourteen years ago. On 10 April 2010, Polish President Lech Kaczyński was flying to Katyn to participate in a commemorative ceremony held on Russian soil, intending to pay tribute to the victims and bring attention to the Soviet crime. The aircraft tragically crashed, resulting in the loss of 96 lives, including the President, his wife and numerous prominent figures from the Polish government. The event has become an integral part of Poland’s recent history.

But this is not the only reason why Katyn’s genocidal crime holds significance beyond history alone. The graves at Katyn, Mednoye and other locations show us the essence of the Soviet soul, bent on evil, destruction and expansion. In the third decade of the 21st century, this soul is being reborn in a slightly different incarnation. The Russian Federation is now almost openly glorifying its communist past and displaying signs of imperial aspirations.

.Two years ago, heavy construction equipment arrived conspicuously at the Polish cemetery in Katyn. But not even the excavators could conceal the truth of the massacre any longer.

Karol Nawrocki