Katyn

On 5 May 1940 Stalin's Politburo ordered the NKVD to liquidate the Polish officers held as POWs after the conquest of Poland. What we now know call the Katyn Massacre claimed the lives of 22,000 men.

There is a Katyn memorial in St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery in Niles, IL. It was conceived and created by Wojciech Seweryn. His was an amazing life.

You can hear about it in this informative interview with his daughter.

Remembering Katyn

Seweryn was born one day before the Nazis invaded Poland. He never knew his father who was one of the POWs murdered by the NKVD.

After making his way to the US, he conceived and designed the memorial and then worked for decades to raise the money and create the monument. One year after the memorial was finished, Seweryn was invited to join Poland's president Lech Kaczy?ski at the ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre. He died with all on board when the president's plane crashed.

The historiography of the massacre tells us a great deal about the state of the historical profession and also sheds an important new light on the "McCarthy Era" and the so-called Red Scare.

But that is for another post.