B2-40 · Katyń and 1939: Between Two Invaders

Katyń and 1939: Between Two Invaders

In August 1939, two dictators who hated each other made a deal. Less than a month later, Poland disappeared from the map for the second time in its history. The story of the next six years, and of one crime that was hidden for half a century, explains a lot about how Poles see their history today.

1939: Two invasions in seventeen days

On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In public, it was a promise not to attack each other. But it also had a secret protocol: Hitler and Stalin had already agreed how they would divide Poland and its neighbors between them.

On September 1, the German army invaded Poland from the west, the north and the south. The first shots were fired at Westerplatte near Gdańsk, and German planes bombed the small town of Wieluń at dawn. Polish soldiers fought hard, and Britain and France declared war on Germany, but they did not send help. Then, on September 17, the Red Army crossed the border from the east. Attacked from both sides, Poland could not survive. Warsaw surrendered on September 28.

Both occupiers wanted to destroy Poland as a nation, not only as a state. In Kraków, the Germans invited the professors of the Jagiellonian University to a lecture in November 1939 and arrested 183 of them. Secondary schools and universities were closed, so teachers taught in secret, in private apartments. In the east, the Soviet secret police deported hundreds of thousands of Polish families to Siberia and Kazakhstan, often at night and with only a few minutes to pack.

Millions of Polish citizens were murdered during the war, among them about three million Polish Jews killed by the Germans in the Holocaust.

1940: A crime in the forest

In the autumn of 1939, the Soviets had taken about 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and other prisoners. Many of them were not professional soldiers but teachers, doctors, lawyers and engineers who had been called up to the army. On March 5, 1940, Stalin and the Soviet leaders signed an order to shoot them. In April and May, they were taken in small groups to the Katyń forest near Smolensk and to other places, shot in the back of the head and buried in mass graves. The aim was clear: to kill the people who could one day lead an independent Poland.

In 1943, the German army found the graves in Katyń and told the world. The Soviet Union answered that the Germans had committed the crime themselves. Britain and the USA had their doubts, but they needed Stalin to win the war, so they stayed silent.

After 1945, the cover-up continued in communist Poland. Schoolbooks repeated the Soviet lie, and families who knew the truth had to keep quiet. Katyń became a taboo word: people could lose their jobs for saying it in public. The lie lasted much longer than the war itself. Only in April 1990 did the Soviet Union finally admit that the NKVD, its secret police, had committed the crime.

In 2007, the director Andrzej Wajda, whose own father was murdered by the NKVD in 1940, made a film called Katyń. Three years later, on April 10, 2010, a plane carrying the Polish president Lech Kaczyński and 95 other people to a ceremony in Katyń crashed near Smolensk. Nobody survived.

Why it still matters

For many Poles, September 1939 and Katyń are not just chapters in a history book. Almost every family has a story of a grandfather who was deported, a great-uncle who never came back or a teacher who taught in secret. Remembering these stories is not about hating anyone today. It is about something simpler: the right of the victims to the truth, and the duty of the living to commemorate them.