Katyn Grandson: No Permission to Forget

On 23 August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty with a secret protocol that delineated their respective spheres of influence over the territory between them. On 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany launched WWII by invading Poland from the West. On 17 September the Soviet Union invaded from the East. Over 200,000 Polish soldiers were captured by the Red Army. About 15,000 military officers, policemen, and border guards were segregated and interned in three Starobelsk, Kozelsk, and Ostashkov.On 5 March 1940 NKVD Chief Beria provided Stalin with a proposal to execute the Poles at the three camps as well as thousands of other Polish prisoners held in Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine. A total of 21,857 Poles were shot by the NKVD and buried in mass graves in April and May 1940. The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and announced in 1943 that they had found one of the mass graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk containing the bodies of the prisoners from Kozelsk. The Nazis claimed that the Polish officers had been killed by the Soviets. The Soviets insisted that the Nazis were responsible. It was not until 1990 that the Soviets admitted that they were the guilty party.The murdered Poles were husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, uncles, and cousins. Stanisław Kawczak was Polish lawyer and writer. He had been conscripted into the Austrian Army in WWI and rose to the rank of captain. He fought in the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1919-1920. He subsequently wrote his memoirs Dying Memoirs of the War 1914-1920. On the eve of WWII he was mobilized again as a captain in the Polish army and was among the officers captured by the Soviets and taken to Starobelsk. His wife and son never saw him again.Some things we should not forget. Some we don’t want to forget. Others we can’t forget. And some things we are not permitted to forget. The Katyn Forest Massacre is all of those.