ED HENRY: Understanding Poland

Police Officer Marcelli Konieczny - 1897-1940 Murdered at Katyn

With only a few remaining relatives in Poland, my wife and I have been traveling to Poland in an attempt to put together her family history. On this latest trip we discovered that Marcelli Konieczny, a ranking Police Officer, and one of her family members, was abducted by the Soviets and murdered along with thousands of others at a place called Katyn (1940). The name of the place, let alone the name of this horrific event is known today to few Americans. The mass executions were first blamed on the Nazis by the Soviets. The Russian government finally, fully admitted through release of documented records that Stalin ordered the mass-executions. Most of the Polish Army Officer corps, Naval Officer corps, and just about every policeman vanished into mass graves. Read the full account:

       "Both occupying powers focused their terror on the educated and ruling elite of the country, and, in the Nazi case, also on the Jews. The eastern half of Poland, except for the region of Wilno which was handed over by the Soviets to the Lithuanians, was formally annexed by the USSR after bogus local plebiscites. Mass arrests took place of key figures in the Polish military, political and economic establishment, of civil servants and trade union leaders. All private and public enterprises were taken over; the press was shut down; all Polish political, cultural and social organizations were dissolved. At first the soviets made strenuous efforts to win over the local non-Polish populations by promoting the Belarussian and Ukrainian languages, by distributing confiscated landed estates among the peasants, and by extending the welfare system. Once effective control had been established, the Soviets launched an attack on all religions, dissolved all local autonomous organizations, including the highly developed Ukrainian co-operative movement, and arrested all local Ukrainian and Zionist leaders. Conscription into the Red Army was introduced, and in April 1940 Soviet-style collectivization was imposed. The entire population was now terrorized into obedience.
   In 1940 and 1941 up to half a million people from all social classes and all ethnic groups, but mostly Poles and Jews, were deported from the Soviet-occupied territories to Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. Entire families, deemed in any way 'unreliable' by the Soviets, suffered this ordeal; scores of thousands were to perish in the inhospitable conditions of their places of exile or from forced labour in the Gulag. By mid-1941 many small towns of pre-war eastern Poland had lost much of their Polish character. The NKVD meted out special attention to captured Polish officers (regulars and reservists), civil servants, policemen and border guards. On orders signed on 5 March 1940 by Stalin and the Politburo, over 21,000 such prisoners were shot in April 1940; of these 4,000 perished in Katyn near Smolensk. For half a century, until Gorbachev's admission in April 1990, Soviet governments were to deny their responsibility for these atrocities. Yet while merciless to those he considered enemies of Soviet power, Stalin sought to recruit Poles, especially left-wing intellectuals, willing to co-operate with the USSR. This policy gained momentum after the unexpected defeat of France in June 1940, which left the USSR alone facing a Nazi dominated European continent. In any confrontation with Germany, the Poles could be useful. In the autumn of 1940 the 85th anniversary of Mickiewicz's death was publicly celebrated in Lwow (L'viv) and in early 1941 the Comintern revived its Polish section.
   Soviet terror was soon outstripped by its Nazi counterpart. The Nazi occupation lasted longer, it effected the majority of the Polish population (indeed, between 1941 and 1944 Nazi control extended to the entire area of pre-war Poland) and it took a heavier toll of life. A vast track of western Poland, including Poznan and Lodz (renamed Litzmannstadt) was incorporated directly into the Third Reich, and its populations classified according to crude and inconsistent 'racial' criteria. To affirm the German character of Upper Silesia and especially of Pomerania, two-fifths of their population were registered wholesale as "German" (and therefore subject to military sevice) as opposed to 2 percent carefully screened in the Wartheland. Those classified as Poles were reduced to the status of a helot underclass, deprived of all property and of access to all but the most basic schooling, and subject to compulsory labour or deportation. In the Wartheland virtually all Polish Catholic churches, monasteries and charitable institutions were closed; in Upper Silesia and Pomerania German was enforced as the language of religious life. Patriotic Polish priests were expelled, arrested, or shot. The central part of Poland, administered separately by the so-called Central Government (to which Galicia was added in 1941), was subject to a regime of terror, semi-starvation and ruthless economic exploitation. It became a dumping ground for all unwanted Poles and Jews from the lands annexed by the Reich. Most Catholic parishes were allowed to function in the Central Government but under many restrictions. Polish Protestants were especially victimized by the Nazis. A policy of "Spiritual Sterilization" brought with it an attack on Polish high culture; museums, libraries, universities, most secondary schools, and theatres were closed down, and the public playing of Chopin's music was forbidden. Only some primary schooling and limited technical training was permitted . . . The incarceration in concentration camps in September 1939 of the staff of Krakow University was a foretaste of the fate awaiting the entire Polish educated class under Nazi rule."

( excerpt: A Concise History of Poland. 2nd Edition. Lukowski and Zawadzki, eds. Cambridge University Press. 2006. )