The Katyn Memorial Service held in remembrance of 14,500 Polish Officers and intelligence personnel killed during Stalin’s rule by the NKVD (secret Russian police) in the Second World War was held at Gunnersbury Cemetery on Sunday 24th April. It was well attended by the Polish scouts, Government Officials, The British Legion, the public, and victims’ families. Consul Tomasz Balcerowski read a letter from Piotr Wilczek, Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in London.
In April 1943, invading German soldiers uncovered eight huge graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union. They contained the bodies of thousands upon thousands of Polish Army officers and intellectual elites who had been incarcerated at the Kozielsk prisoner-of-war camp.
According to historian Gerhard Weinberg, Stalin sought to destroy a potential future Polish military force by carrying out the massacre. The Soviet authorities, particularly Stalin, saw the Polish captives as a “problem” threatening to rebel against Soviet control.
During the Cold War, successive British governments objected to efforts by the UK’s Polish community to erect a memorial to the killing. The Soviet Union did not want Katyn to be remembered and exerted pressure on the United Kingdom to prevent its construction. As a result, the Katyn memorial was put on hold for several years. Local Poles finally gained permission to erect the memorial. No official representation from either government was present at the unveiling ceremony. This Katyn monument in Gunnersbury Cemetery was the first in the world, dedicated on September 18, 1976. It was constructed despite resistance from both the Soviet and English governments.
Ludwik Korta (my great grandfather) was a Polish Legionary, decorated with the Cross of Independence, and a social activist. He was arrested and found himself in jail as a political prisoner in Pińsk and disappeared without a trace. He was one of the many to have been murdered by the Soviets. The relatives and loved ones of the Polish POWs in Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov stopped receiving their letters. For many years, the families of the POWs awaited their return, thinking they had gone missing somewhere in the east. Ludwik’s wife, Józefa, along with my grandmother and her siblings, after years of misfortune in Siberia and time spent in refugee camps in Africa, survived, to find themselves displaced but safe in England. My great grandmother Józefa died in 1980 and together with my grandparents who passed away recently, all rest at Gunnersbury cemetery.
On April 13th, 1990, the Soviet government officially accepted blame for the Katyn Massacre of World War II, 50 years after the tragedy. Another decade passed until my grandmother finally came to learn what happened to her father, once documents holding the names of those killed were released.
For over 50 years, the truth about what happened in the Katyn Forest stayed secret, while the Soviets guilty of the mass murders denied responsibility and accused the Germans. The recognition of what had long been suspected finally enabled families to publicly mourn their loved ones. The inscription on the monument says – gives us cause for thought today: “The conscience of the world calls for a verification of the truth”.
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