Russian and Polish leaders commemorate 70th anniversary of Katyn Massacre

The Russian and Polish Prime Ministers attended a memorial service yesterday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre near the modern-day Russian city of Smolensk. Polish PM Donald Tusk accompanied Vladimir Putin to a memorial at the site where 4,500 Polish prisoners of war were killed by Soviet security forces during World War II. Putin admitted the Soviets told cynical lies for 50 years about what happened at Katyn while Tusk urged Putin to ensure all Soviet-era archives related to the massacre are open to researchers. It was the first time leaders of both countries attended the service. (photo: Reuters)

The massacre remains a deeply troubling event for Polish-Russian relations. In 1940 Poland had temporarily ceased to exist (not for the first time) as the Nazis and the Soviets carved it up under the terms of their Non-Aggression Pact. The NKVD interned about 125,000 Polish prisoners of which 40,000 were still in their hands in early 1940 and these were held at various camps across the west of the Soviet Union. The internees underwent a lengthy interrogation to weed out those who had no Communist sympathies.

On 5 March 1940 Stalin’s head of the NKVD secret police (which would eventually become the KGB after Stalin’s death) Lavrentiy Beria wrote a letter to his boss. The letter stated a large number of former officers of the Polish Army, Police, political groups and intelligence services were held in NKVD prisoner-of-war camps in Ukraine and Belarus. They were all, he wrote, “sworn enemies of Soviet authority full of hatred for the Soviet system.” Beria accused them of counter-revolutionary activities and “anti-Soviet agitation”. He urged 25,000 of them be tried before special tribunals and be applied the “supreme penalty: shooting”.

Stalin was one of six other Politburo leaders who signed off on Beria’s letter. The 25,000 on Beria’s list were deemed enemies of the state. Stalin knew exactly what he was doing. If Poland ever became independent again, its leaders would not forgive the Soviets for their treachery in attacking in unison with the Nazis. The obvious solution in his eyes was to eliminate those leaders. The three main camps where they were held were Kolezsk, Starobielsk and Ostashtov. Kolezsk camp housed about 5,000 Polish military officers and was close to Katyn Forest, about 20km from the city of Smolensk. Between April and May 1940, the NKVD transferred about 4,500 prisoners to the forest to be executed one by one, all under the cover of darkness. Similar numbers died at the two other camps and more still died in Belarus and Ukraine. The final death toll was in excess of 22,000.

What made Katyn special was that it was found out. Polish workers found mass graves there as early as 1942 but no one would believe their claims. The official Russian story (now that they had switched sides after the German Barbarossa invasion) was that Polish officers were released in the east and went missing in Manchuria. In April 1943, retreating Wehrmacht soldiers found a mass grave at Katyn and Goebbels used it as a propaganda weapon to sow discord between the USSR and Poland. It very nearly worked with Free Polish leader General Sikorski threatening to break off the alliance. His unexplained death two months later proved very convenient for Stalin.

When the Russians re-took Katyn they destroyed the cemetery Polish Red Cross had put in place. They held a commission which whitewashed the incident and blamed the Nazies. With bigger fish to fry, the Western Alliance overlooked the matter and resisted internal pressure to investigate the matter further. The Russians tried to include it as a German war crime in the Nuremburg trials but had to drop it due to lack of evidence. In Communist Poland it was dangerous to mention Katyn, but that very danger meant the memory remained cherished through the years. As the Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1989, Russian scholars admitted the truth about Katyn and a year later President Gorbachev finally publicly stated the NKVD had executed the Poles, and confirmed there were two other burial sites similar to the one at Katyn.

In his speech yesterday at Katyn, Putin firmly put the blame on the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime. This is part of Putin’s agenda to placate the Poles. Last August Putin praised Polish soldiers and citizens for their bravery in resisting the Nazis at an anniversary ceremony in Poland observing the start of World War II. Russia has also invited Poland to take part in the WWII Victory Day parade on Red Square this year for the first time. And last week, a Kremlin-run television channel showed “Katyn,” an Oscar-nominated film by the Polish director Andrzej Wajda which had screened only a few times in Russia. With Poland encouraging the US to host its missile shield, it is likely all be part of a grand Faustian bargain. But for now we may enjoy a rare Putin truth while it lasts.

UPDATE Saturday, 10 April.
The anniversary ceremony has been completely overshadowed by the shocking plane crash which killed the Polish president and many of the country's elite on the way to Katyn.

A pilgrimage to Auschwitz

It felt entirely appropriate getting to Auschwitz by train. My slow rattler was taking two hours to get me just 65km from Krakow to the town of Oswiecim. The cold snowy November weather merely added to the terrible sense of identification I was channelling as the train seemed to plough through the whitened fields. But it was superficial identification. For one, I had a view – something which would have been denied the hundreds of thousands who made the fateful journey in the war years - secondly I was here voluntarily, and thirdly I had a return ticket; again a luxury denied those doomed to take this journey in the 1940s.

It seemed doubly shocking that such a place could lie in the shadow of beautiful and graceful Krakow. The former capital of Poland remained the centre of the country’s scientific, artistic and cultural life in the middle of the last century. The city also had a flourishing Jewish population. Yet as the capital of the so-called "general government" during the Nazi occupation (with governor-general Hans Frank setting up his headquarters in the city’s imposing Wawel Castle), it made perfect sense for the area to be the centre of Hitler’s plans for a Final Solution to the “Jewish problem”.

The unassuming nearby town of Oswiecim was perhaps an appropriately grisly choice to house a German death camp. Prior to the war, it had a thriving Jewish population of its own – they even formed the majority of the town. They were a largely Yiddish speaking people who called the town by its German name Auschwitz. The outskirts of the town also held an old Polish brick barracks which was expropriated by the Nazis during the invasion in 1939. Initially the Germans were just looking for a place to store political prisoners and about 700 Polish intellectuals and resistance movement members were interned there in June 1940.

But gradually the scope of Auschwitz increased. There were a small number of Jews in the initial shipment, but it didn’t take long for their numbers to increase. Then came other undesirables and enemies of the Reich - the Communists, the disabled, the homosexuals, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the “gypsies”. This word gypsy (Zigeuner in German, which is why they were identified by the letter "Z") was a pejorative word for a people that in central Europe were known as Sinti and in South East Europe known as Roma. Possibly half a million Sinti and Roma perished in the death camps. The Sinti and Roma exhibition in Auschwitz I is one of the harrowing highlights of the visit.

Above the entrance to the camp is the infamous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei”. In 1872 the German novelist Lorenz Diefenbach used the phrase (roughly translated as “work liberates”) as the title of a novel and it was successfully adopted by the 1920s Weimar government to promote their public works program. The Nazis knew a good thing when they saw it and continued to use the phrase in their propaganda program. The commander of Dachau ordered it to be put on the entrance gate to his concentration camp and it was repeated at Sachsenhausen, Terezin, and most notably, at Auschwitz. Here prisoners walked under the gate, accompanied by the strains of a Jewish orchestra.

But not many Jews had this experience. Auschwitz was too small to cope with the growing number of prisoners. The Wannsee Conference had authorised the Final Solution and Germany needed a bigger and more efficient camp to process the vast numbers involved. In 1941, they built Auschwitz II in the woods some three kilometres away in a place the Poles called Brzezinka and the Germans translated as Birkenau. This was a vast emporium of death. No orchestras here, nor any pretence of “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Here, a massive tower overlooked the main gate and the railway tracks led straight to the gas ovens at the far end of the camp.

Auschwitz II was a massive operation and the largest of all the Nazi death camps. Most of the killing, torture, and medical experiments took place here. Cattle cars unloaded their cargo and those lucky enough to be selected not to die immediately were sent to one of the camps to work as slave labourers. These “lucky ones” merely had their fate postponed to overwork, hunger, sickness and a slow lingering death. But the vast majority were sent straight to the gas chambers. Four crematoria fuelled by the hydrogen cyanide insecticide known as Zyklon (Cyclone) B efficiently murdered 20,000 people each day. Evidence of the vast numbers involved is retained in the museum. Behind one glass exhibit are a vast collection of 20,000 pairs of shoes, yet this barely represents one day of gassing. There are also masses of suitcases, spectacles, human hair and other poignant reminders of the daily lives of the hundreds of thousands who died here.

By January 1945, the Red Army were closing in on the camp. Himmler ordered the camp to be destroyed and sent 60,000 survivors on a mid-Winter death march back to the Reich. Only 20,000 survived. Another 7,500 too weak to march were left behind at Auschwitz and liberated by the Russians. At least 1.5 million died (other estimates are as high as 5 million) in the camps themselves, the vast majority at Auschwitz II.

The word “Auschwitz” continues to be synonymous with the Shoah as a whole. It remains newsworthy on an almost daily basis. This week for instance, The Scotsman told the story of how educational trips to Auschwitz were saved despite government cutbacks. Meanwhile Germany is pursuing the arrest of Holocaust denier Gerald Frederick Tobin who argued the Auschwitz death camp was too small for the mass murder of Jews to have been carried out there. Across the pond, the Isthmus of Madison, Wisconsin reviewed Mark Herman’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” about the 8-year-old son of a German officer appointed the commandant of the camp, while the LA Times reported the death of 80 year old art dealer Jan Krugier who survived the camp and the subsequent death march. As for me, having spent several absorbing hours of tramping around these sacred grounds, I silently took the train back to Krakow thinking about the frailty of human reason.

Sikorski and me: a cryptic journey through Krakow

My hopes of seeing the crypt today at Krakow's Wawel Cathedral were dashed by world events. I had made it to freezing Krakow after an overnight nine hour train journey from Prague and I was eagerly looking forward too visiting the cathedral and castle on the acropolis at Wawel. But the cathedral crypt proved to be a no-go area.

I had wondered why there were so many TV cameras hovering around the cathedral grounds. It seems the body of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the exiled Polish WWII prime minister, was exhumed from the crypt yesterday in an investigation into his death in 1943. He was now being reburied after an autopsy this morning. He certainly deserves a bit of peace. 65 years after his death, the poor chap was forced to undergo DNA analysis, computer tomography, radiology and toxicology tests. The results of the test will be announced in a few weeks time.

Władysław Eugeniusz Sikorski was the hero of the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-21 when the young Soviet Russia invaded Poland intent on taking revolution to the heart of Europe. Things were looked bad for the Polish until Sikorski masterminded the "Miracle of the Vistula" defeating a numerically and materially superior Russian army near Warsaw. Shortly after, the Russians sued for peace and abandoned the idea of international revolution. Sikorski and a young French instructor with the Polish army, a certain Charles de Gaulle, saw how lightning fast warfare would be the way of the future and were both instrumental in the new science of blitzkrieg.

Sikorski was rewarded for his efforts by becoming the Polish army chief of staff and served in the national government in the mid 1920s. He withdrew from politics after Poland became a dictatorship in 1926 and spent much of the next ten years in Paris. He returned prior to the war he predicted would occur but escaped to London after Poland was invaded (where the Germans showed they had been paying attention to Sikorski's blitzkrieg techniques). There he was appointed Prime Minister in exile and placed at the head of the large Polish army based in England. After the German invasion of Russia, Churchill sent Sikorski to negotiate with Stalin to reopen diplomatic relations. But Stalin wanted a piece of the Polish pie after the war and demanded unacceptable concessions.

In 1943, the German Wehrmacht discovered the mass grave of Katyń where the bodies of 4,500 Polish officers were piled up in several pits. The Soviets had killed the officers in 1940 after they had carved up Poland with the Germans. Radio Berlin gleefully reported the news in an attempt to put a wedge between the Russians and Polish. The wedge was successful. The Russians claimed the Nazis had carried out the killings in 1941 but Sikorski didn't believe them and wanted the matter investigated. The Russians used this as an excuse to break off diplomatic relations with Sikorski's government and Stalin campaigned for a Soviet-backed Polish government led by Wanda Wasilewska, a dedicated communist.

Sikorski was becoming a serious thorn in the side of the relationship between Britain and Russia. He was conveniently removed from the equation after he died in mysterious circumstances. On 4 July 1943, he was returning from an inspection of Polish forces deployed in the Middle East, when his plane crashed on take off into the sea off Gibraltar killing him and eight others (including his daughter). A British court of inquiry found no reason for the crash merely saying the "aircraft became uncontrollable for reasons which cannot be established". The files of the investigation were to be kept secret until 2050. In the absence of hard facts and the absurdly long secrecy requirement, conspiracy theories have abounded.

It didn't help when it was revealed a Soviet aircraft was parked next to Sikorski's unattended plane at Gibraltar. The head of M6 on the Rock at the time was Kim Philby, who would later be exposed as a Soviet spy. Security was casual in Gibraltar, by wartime standards. Sabotage was certainly possible and there was a strong motive. With the imposing Sikorski out of the way, it proved a lot easier to install a puppet pro-Soviet government in Warsaw once the war ended.

After his body was recovered from the Mediterranean, Sikorski was buried in a brick-lined grave at the Polish War Cemetery in Newark-on-Trent, England. In 1993, his remains were exhumed and transferred to the royal crypts at Wawel Castle. In July this year, Polish prosecutors announced they would reinvestigate the matter and the Archbishop of Krakow gave permission for Sikorski's body to be re-exhumed. "Given Sikorski's important role in Poland's history and having the tools and the know-how that we have now," said Ewa Koj, the prosecutor overseeing the investigation "we cannot let this remain a historical mystery." Good luck to them, at least the mystery why I couldn't see the crypt today has been solved.

Lithuania looks to sign up for US missile shield

It looks increasingly likely that Baltic nation Lithuania has signed up to take on the US’s missile interceptor shield. The system is part of the US’s belligerent offensive policy and they have already threatened to use it on Iran. The US has already signed a deal with the Czech Republic to one half of its missile interceptor system and was initially dealing with Poland to site the second half. But after talks stalled with the Polish government, Lithuania moved in.

Poland President Donald Tusk wanted $1 billion in compensation for hosting the missile shield but Washington baulked at this demand. The US put a deadline of mid July for Poland to lower their price but Tusk has shown no interest in changing the Polish position. He said the American proposals were not satisfactory from a Polish perspective. “The United States, our ally, is completely free to make decisions,” he said. “We have the rights and we will exercise the right to formulate our own conditions, our expectations.”

Now it seems the US have found a willing alternative in Vilnius. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates travelled to Lithuania in February for a NATO meeting and has since met Prime Minister Kirkilas to discuss the shield deal. Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said Lithuania was willing to consider hosting the interceptors” But he said the US preference was still to work out a deal with the Poles. “But prudent planning requires that we simultaneously look at backups, if necessary,” he said. “Lithuania would geographically serve as a good alternative.”

Polish diplomats were in Washington on Monday still aiming to hammer out a deal. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorki met Condoleeza Rice to talk about hosting the interceptors a day before she was due to fly to Prague to sign the Czech end of the deal (an early warning radar). Sikorski wants to use the billion dollars he hopes the US will pay in order to modernise Polish air defences. He played coy with the media after the meeting saying the deal was still on track. Asked if he could salvage a deal, Sikorski said, "There is no need to salvage, because talks have continued all along and will continue."

The US insists the missile interceptor system is for dealing with what it euphemistically calls “rogue nations”. However nearby Russia is unimpressed. It rightly argues that if the intended target is supposedly Iran, then the missile site should be in Turkey or somewhere else nearby. Russia says the real purpose of the shield is to neutralise the Russian nuclear arsenal, and tilt the nuclear balance which exists in Europe in favour of Washington. New President Dmitri Medvedev criticised the shield on a recent visit to Berlin. He said American military expansion worried Moscow and could destroy relations between East and West "in a radical way, for a long time".

Lithuania, meanwhile, would need very little encouragement to rattle Moscow. Even before independence in 1990, then Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis needed very little prodding to provoke the Soviet Union. Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs how the Soviets acknowledged Lithuania’s right to self-determination and the desire to leave the Union. But, they were not interested in Gorbachev’s request to “respect legal procedures and a proper timetable for the divorce”. His heirs appear to want to continue to thumb their nose at its big neighbour, and likely at a much cheaper price than the Poles.

Government defeated in Polish election

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has admitted defeat in yesterday’s general election, with exit polls predicting victory for the populist Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska - PO) party. His conservative Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość - PiS) polled about 31 percent, far short of its centre-right rival with 44 percent. Kaczynski’s defeat will see the 12th change of leadership in Poland in the 16 years since the end of communism.

Despite chilly weather, Poland had its best post-Communist election turnout with barely 55 percent of eligible voters going to the polls (only 40 per cent voted in the last election three years ago). Kaczynski called the election two years early after the collapse of a right-wing coalition. PiS had constantly bickered with its two minor partners and Kaczynski was eventually left bereft of supporters to form an effective government.

PO campaigned on a platform to bring Polish troops home from Iraq. They also favour lower taxes, less bureaucracy and market-oriented policies aimed at speeding up Poland’s entry into the Euro. It seems likely they will take at least 224 seats with their preferred coalition partners the Peasants Party taking 27 seats. Together this will be a comfortable working majority in Poland’s 460 seat lower chamber known as the “Sejm”.

PO is led by the Gdansk born but very unPolish sounding Donald Tusk. The country’s likely next Prime Minister is 50 years old and married with two children. Both his parents came from what was then the free city of Danzig and survived German slave labour camps. Tusk was involved in the underground early days of the Solidarity movement. In the later 1980s, he left Solidarity and became a Liberal. In 1991 he stood for parliament and his fledgling party got 7.5% of votes (37 places in the Sejm). In 2001 he set up PO and has grown the party gradually through the decade.

He now says that Poland needed to focus on the economic opportunities presented by membership in the EU. "It is Civic Platform's intention to make Poles feel much better in their own country than they have felt so far,'' Tusk told cheering supporters. "We are going to do huge work and we will do it well. You have the right to rejoice today." Although Tusk is believed to have a close relationship with Washington, his party has threatened to break the outgoing government's negotiations with the US on hosting a missile defence system on Polish soil unless offered sufficient security trade-offs.

Kaczynski’s defeat brings to end a unique situation where a country’s two key roles are filled by twin brothers. While Jaroslaw has been PM, brother Lech Kaczynski is Poland's president. Lech does not face a presidential election until 2010 but opposition parties together look set to get enough seats to override his power to veto legislation. The new government is likely to rebuild ties with EU partners such as Germany that have been badly strained by the Kaczynski brothers.

Both Kaczynskis earned a reputation of troublemakers with their nationalist agenda since coming to power in 2005. Despite Poland’s booming economy, the twins had ruled over a party cursed with constant infighting. Tusk’s party has successfully accused them of abusing secret services and undermining democracy with attacks on the judiciary and tight control of state media.

Ryszard Kapuscinski is dead

The Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski died on 23 January. Kapuscinski, who gained international acclaim for his books chronicling wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world, died of a heart attack, his literary agent said. He was 74.

Kapuscinski was born in 1932 in the then Polish (now Belarusian) city of Pinsk. When Hitler invaded Poland from the West in September 1939, Stalin lived up to his part of the infamous non-aggression pact by invading Poland from the West. The eastern border city of Pinsk was among the first to fall to Soviet forces. Aged 7, Kapuscinski became a starving refugee and fled the city with his family ahead of the Soviet invasion. His father, a teacher and Polish army officer, was captured and interned by the Soviets but escaped to fight in the Polish underground. After the devastation of World War II, young Ryszard became a poet and earned a history degree at Warsaw University. He married a paediatrician, Alicja, with whom he had a daughter.

But Kapuscinski was never much of a family man. He joined the official Polish news agency PAP. Aged 23, he was posted to India, his first trip outside Poland. It was to start a life-long love affair with travel. From 1958 to 1981, he was PAP’s sole foreign correspondent. In that time, he witnessed 27 coups and revolutions, befriended many leaders, and was sentenced to death four times, according to his American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. One of his first assignments was to Africa. He covered the independence of the Congo crossing illegally into the country from Sudan. He stayed in Africa for several years because the PAP could not afford to send him home until he became seriously ill with malarial meningitis.

Kapuscinski recovered and continued to travel to the world’s hotspots in Africa, Asia and South America. As a representative of a Communist country, Kapuscinski gained access to leftist revolutionaries across the world: Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Ben Bella in Algeria, Che Guevara in Cuba. He immersed himself in the locality of each country and would never contact home except to file his news reports.

He eventually decided Communist newspaper articles could not do justice to the complex political situation he encountered across the globe and the notes he took on them. Kapuscinski began to document his experiences in the 1970s with a series of insightful books. One of his most famous was “The Emperor” which was published in 1978. It described the atmosphere at the court of Haile Selassie towards the end of the Ethiopian leader’s reign. Ostensibly a straight forward account of Selassie’s trouble, the book was also a sly critique of Kapuscinski’s native Communist Poland. Fellow journalist Frank Bajak described the book “a meditation on the mechanisms of authoritarian rule and the retinues of unpopular regimes”.

Kapuscinski himself admitted “it's not about Ethiopia or Haile Selassie — rather, it's about the Central Committee of the [Polish] Communist Party”. In the same interview, he described his writing as the combination of three elements. These elements were travel as exploration (not as a tourist), reading literature on the subject of his travel and reflection on the places and readings he experienced.

1978 was a fruitful year for Kapuscinski. As well as “The Emperor” he also published a series of stories called “The Soccer War.” The book is a collection of dispatches from his postings in the Third World. The title story is about the 1969 six-day war between El Salvador and Honduras. The war was fought over immigration and land rights but was exacerbated by World Cup qualifying games between the countries. In 1982 Kapuscinski wrote “Szachinszach” (Shah of Shahs in English). Kapuscinski was in Iran when the Shah was toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The book documents the immediate events surrounding the revolution and also traces the history of British and American interference in Iran.

Kapuscinski travelled and wrote into his old age, although he no longer visited what he called the "really wicked places". In 1993, he wrote "Imperium" about the fall of the Soviet Union. His friend, the sociologist and writer Jadwiga Staniszkis told Polish Radio that Kapuscinski died before he could write a book about Poland. "I think Kapuscinski was planning eventually to write a book on Poland, in a sense waiting to find a key, because usually he worked by finding some concrete event which was at the same time a sort of symbolic moment," she said. "Kapuscinski was looking for something like that in Poland. He was enthusiastic about Solidarity. For him it was not solidarity of intelligentsia. He was conscious of the deep moral transition inside the common people."

Kapuscinski’s books were translated into more than 20 languages. “The starting point is observation, travels, that which I see, that which I encounter, people, what I myself live through,” Kapuscinski said in a 1994 interview. “But all of that is to be able to impart universal truths, to lead to wider reflection, historical reflection.” Ryszard Kapuscinski died in Warsaw on 23 January, 2007 after complications with heart surgery.