Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin's Polish Massacre

Rating:
Summary: A Chilling Indictment
Review: Fifty eight years after the end of WWII, the holocaust remains under constant public scrutiny while most other of the almost innumerable atrocities of that great conflict continue to be either ignored or pooh-poohed by those who continue to rationalize them for personal political reasons. Because of the incessant yowling about the holocaust, people tend to forget that many people suffered on all sides during the war. Jews were neither the only victims, nor were they even the war's chief victims.
Of the belligerents, Germany, Russia, and Poland suffered the greatest human and material losses. Of the three, only Poland was blameless in the end for the death and destruction wrought by a war which passed over its territory twice in five years.
Most of us have at least heard about the massacre of Polish officers, professionals, and intelligentsia by the Soviets at Katyn Forest. Had it not been for a fortuitous find by German forces occupying that part of the Soviet Union and the meticulous way in which they handled it, we might today be saying that Katyn was just another one of Hitler's monstrous crimes.
In Katyn:The Untold Story Of Stalin's Polish Massacre, Allen Paul puts human faces on the victims by introducing us to some of them and their families before the war begins and then following the odyssies of the families and their men as both are arrested and deported as war begins and the invading Communists seek to purge Poland of class enemies and those who might in the future oppose them. (One family lives out the war in the German General Government, but the man of the house had been arrested in Lwow by the Soviets and eventually became a victim of the murders collectively known as the Katyn massacre.)
Particularly grim are the chapters which recount how the (male) victims are led to believe they are being repatriated, are prepared a feast, then led away afterwards to their horror and dismay to the killing fields at Katyn. The methodical and inhuman way of dispatch is almost sickening but the real shock comes when the bodies are discovered by the Nazis after they invade the Soviet Union. Most are virtually fused together and partially mummified by being tightly packed at burial, many stacked in the burial pits like so much cordwood.
Shocking, but not surprising given Stalin's treatment of his own people, is the way Polish women and children are literally dumped in the steppes and in Siberia and expected to fend for themselves in the harsh, unforgiving climate.
The families of Paul's focus do eventually make it out after suffering the greatest hardships. The author has met these survivors, of course, and their narratives put some meat on the dry bones of history. Millions of other Polish deportees never made it home.
Allen Paul's book is a chilling indictment, not only of Stalin and his murderous NKVD, but also of US and British diplomacy which failed to take any steps to ameliorate the conditions of Poles who had been arbitrarily arrested and summarily deported. The weakness of Churchill and Roosevelt in the face of Communist demands began with the suppression of evidence of Soviet culpability for Katyn and their failure to support postwar Polish territorial integrity at the Teheran and Yalta conferences. It then continued with tacit support for the postwar dispensation in Poland in which hundreds of thousands more were murdered by Stalin's henchmen, leading ultimately to the Iron Curtain and forty-five years of the Cold War.
You can tell by the tiny number of in-print books on this subject how little historical relevance the Katyn murders are given. I invite you to read this book. It may give you a whole new perspective on WWII and the moral dangers of alliance with the devil.

Rating:
Summary: moving, emotional, striking images
Review: I must admit that I skipped some of the chapters about the politics of war so I could focus on the stories of the families. These are the untold stories of WW2: a little Polish girl running up and down the railway station searching for her father; a family sent to a labor camp, doing the most humiliating arduous work. These families suffer, but there are stories of hope and love written in, keeping you interested. The pictures put some faces with the stories too.

Rating:
Summary: moving, emotional, striking images
Review: I must admit that I skipped some of the chapters about the politics of war so I could focus on the stories of the families. These are the untold stories of WW2: a little Polish girl running up and down the railway station searching for her father; a family sent to a labor camp, doing the most humiliating arduous work. These families suffer, but there are stories of hope and love written in, keeping you interested. The pictures put some faces with the stories too.