The politics of a long-buried memory resurface in the U.S.
A move is on in the U.S. Congress to join the Polish Parliament in remembering the more than 21,000 Polish military and civilian leaders murdered by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest in 1940.
A resolution marking the 60th anniversary of Katyn, and recognizing the scholars and researchers who told the truth about the crime despite the Soviet Union's steadfast denials until the 1990 admission by Mikhail Gorbachev, was introduced by Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan April 13.
The speaker of the Polish Sejm, Maciej Plazynski, urged Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert to back the move when they met in Washington on April 4 and thinks his urgings may bear fruit when Congress reconvenes in early May.
The introduction of such a resolution has been made a slightly less thorny political issue in the U.S. thanks to the actions of newly elected Russian Premier Vladimir Putin.
Putin followed the path of Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in acknowledging what happened in Katyn when he called President Aleksander Kwasniewski to tell him that more mass graves had been found, and then took a giant step forward, proposing a joint Russian-Polish team to investigate the graves.
"Putin seems to be a good strategist and thinks it is in his best interest to open a new chapter in Polish-Russian relations," says Marek Podhorecki, who has spearheaded the efforts here to get a U.S. Congress resolution on Katyn.
"By calling Kwasniewski about the discovery of new sites of the Katyn massacre, he is showing good will and compassion toward Polish society. He knows how important it is to have access to all the documents. And, obviously, Putin has access to all the records of that period," he said.
Podhorecki said his reasons for pushing for the congressional Katyn resolution are both personal and political. "My father, who died last year, was 19 in 1939 and was fighting the Germans as a partisan in the woods in the Sandomierz-Kielce area. (Working for the resolution) is partly in his memory."
On the political side, Podhorecki put forth the resolution with the blessing of the Popular Conservative Party (SKL), one of four parties in the fractious Solidarity Election Action (AWS) coalition. He worked closely with Bronislaw Komorowski, chairman of the Sejm National Defense Committee, and the newly elected SKL and Sejm Local Government Chairman Jan Maria Rokita. If the AWS self-destructs, the SKL would like to be front-and-center, appealing to voters as a contemporary conservative party.
In Congress, the resolution's backers are mostly Republicans, although support has also come from the Victims of Communism Foundation, which is part of the Heritage Foundation whose board includes such Democratic luminaries as Zbigniew Brzezinski. None of the congressional sponsors are from the Polish-American strongholds around Chicago or in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area, however.
Some U.S. political scientists still shy away from confronting their past mistakes about Joseph Stalin. They are loath to concede that the anti-Communist crusaders who dominated Congress in the 1950s might have been right about the Soviet Union and about Katyn, which Stalin blamed on the Germans. It took Gorbachev to set the record straight in 1990, and Yeltsin to actually hand over records showing it was Stalin himself who ordered the murder of Polish elites so as to wipe out any possible resistance to his plans for a postwar takeover of Poland and Central-Eastern Europe.
The U.S. Congress has been the only major Western body to even investigate Katyn. Its 1952 hearings stand today as a credible record of what happened. Testimony came from some survivors as well as from international medical inspectors from a dozen neutral countries who had concluded in 1943 that the Soviets, and not the Germans, had controlled the Katyn forests when the victims were shot in the back of the head and buried in mass graves.
Britain not only never investigated the issue but held back British Poles who wanted to erect a Katyn memorial, says Stanislaw Berkieta, whose parents had escaped from the Soviet Union as part of the Polish Army formed there by Polish General Wladyslaw Anders. (Stalin's repeated rebuffs of Anders' attempts to find out what had happened to the Polish military officers is splendidly documented in the groundbreaking book "Katyn" by Allen Paul, published in paperback two years ago and the only contemporary account in English.)
"Poles in Britain in the 1960s tried to get permission for a Katyn memorial but there was one bureaucratic fight after another," said Berkieta. "Finally, they got it in 1990," in Chiswick Cemetery, "where there also are a number of famous Polish exiled generals."
Berkieta, a Citibank (Poland) vice president for strategy, is one of a handful of British Poles back here helping rebuild Poland and keeping a close eye on the Katyn anniversary.
When Congress puts the spotlight on people who had the courage to come forward during the Cold War, Berkieta knows credit will partly go to the Reverend Zdzislaw Peszkowski. Peszkowski was influential in persuading Congress to hold the hearings and helped focus them. He is now in Poland, helping organize the families of Katyn victims.
