Address by the President of the Republic of Poland on the 71st Anniversary of the Katyn Massacre

I am looking back to the moment when I first visited this place with Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who is also among us today, Ladies and Gentlemen. 

I am looking back to the April of 1990, when, upon assuming the office of the deputy minister of national defence for educational matters, I made my first trip, paid my first visit, went on my first pilgrimage here to Katyn. That is why, having taken part in the same prayer meetings, the same pilgrimages, for later there were also pilgrimages from the Sejm, when I served as the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, we share a lot of memories with Mr Prime Minister. Now the time has come to sum things up, however, for the Katyn Year, decreed by a Parliamentary resolution, is drawing to an end. 

Ladies and Gentlemen,   

We bow our heads today in reverie and in prayer at the site of the execution of the victims of the Katyn massacre. We bow our heads before the graves of the Polish army officers, police officers, border guards and prison service officers, clerics and Polish state officials: prisoners of war killed treacherously without trial or any right to defence.	

We also bow our heads in reverie and in prayer before the ‘death ditches’ in which the Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians murdered with equal bestiality were hidden. For the Katyn forest is a silent witness to the fact that the Stalinist system was cruel also to its own citizens.  

Each of these graves hides within it an individual human fate, the fate of a human being. The joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams of each individual life, as well as the longing for the loved ones and concern for the homeland and the family left so far away. It also hides within it the tragedy of that last moment in which every one of the prisoners, separated from his or her colleagues, his or her companions in the misery they had been through, stood here all alone, feeling the steel, the coldness of the gun barrel, on the nape of the neck, facing his or her Soviet executioners, with no-one else but God our Lord looking on from above.	

Standing here today before these graves, I wish first of all to recall the words from an undelivered speech by my predecessor, the late President Lech Kaczyński, who died tragically on his way to Katyn on 10 April 2010. In that speech, he sketched a kind of panorama of Polish history beginning from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, through wartime vicissitudes and the Polish contribution to the war effort, up to the end of the war, so bitter for us Poles, and the post-war years marked by the continuing Katyn lie. In the conclusion of his speech, President Lech Kaczyński wrote: 

‘The Katyn tragedy and struggling against the Katyn lie have been a formative experience for successive generations of Poles. This is part of our history, of our memory and our identity. However, this is also part of the history of Europe as a whole, part of world history. This is a message pertinent to every individual and to all nations. Pertinent both to the past and to the future of human civilization. The Katyn massacre will forever bring to mind the threat of enslavement and destruction of individuals and nations. It will forever bring to mind the power of lies. However, it will also be testimony to the fact that individuals and nations can, even in the most difficult times, choose freedom and defend the truth.’

Ladies and Gentlemen, 

Let us focus once more on the nature and essence of the Katyn massacre. And on the question why it left our two nations, the Polish nation and the Russian nation, wounded so painfully and for such a long time. 

It was the intention of Stalin and his comrades who passed this disgraceful and vile verdict by putting their handwritten signatures to it in violation of all laws of war, to destroy a large part of the Polish state elite or, as the order stated: ‘hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority’. This was, wrote the Vilnius University Professor Stanisław Świaniewicz, himself withdrawn from a ‘death transport’ at the very last moment, part of ‘a campaign to clear the ground for a further expansion of Soviet imperialism’. 

The Stalinist executioners violated the laws and conventions of the civilized world. They atrociously murdered the prisoners of war in their captivity, and pushed their bodies into unmarked ‘death ditches’, erased both from the map and from human memory. And when those ditches were discovered and shown to the world by Hitler, Stalin’s ally until not so long before, not only did Stalin deny having committed the crime, but also accused Poland, calling for a fair international investigation, of acting in collusion with the Third Reich and severed diplomatic relations with the legitimate Polish government recognized by international law.  

That was when the Katyn lie was born. It was born with the Western world behaving indifferently and hypocritically. This resulted later in the Yalta division of the world and in its consent to have a foreign government imposed upon Poland. 

In the years that followed, the Katyn lie was the official version upheld in public life, even though mostly the crime itself was simply passed over in silence. The truth about Katyn lived on in homes and families, and in schools, too, there were teachers who passed it on to their pupils, but those struggling to have the truth about Katyn recognized in public life did so at the risk of repression and sometimes even of imprisonment. The Polish émigré community cherished and disseminated that truth, and so did, as time went by, people of great courage back in Poland, the ones who put up the Katyn Cross at Warsaw’s Powązki cemetery, as well as the publishers of the clandestine press and books. The truth about Katyn was faithfully preserved by the families of those murdered there. 

In Russia, the situation was different, I believe. Here the knowledge about that crime, if it did reach ordinary people at all, was a false knowledge. After Stalin’s crimes were first revealed to the world, including to the Soviet Union, in 1956, the truth about Katyn did not come to light. The awareness of the people, of many Russians, was and perhaps sometimes still is, I believe, influenced by the memory of the great national war in which their fathers had often perished with Stalin’s name on their lips. Thus, it was only with difficulty that the truth about his crimes found its way into public awareness. 

For long decades, the Katyn massacre and the Katyn lie have remained not only a painful wound on our national history. They have also poisoned relations between the Poles and the Russians. Wrongs and falsehood divide not only individuals but also whole nations. That is why we are today grateful to those Russians who understood it in the past and to those who understand it today. That is why, as soon as it became possible, Poland, by then already a free country, embarked upon persevering struggle for the truth about Katyn, a struggle to have this crime revealed and fully documented. Much has occurred in this respect, and yet much still remains to be done. 

The representatives of the Katyn Families present here today, to whom all of us, as a national community, owe our highest respect for their struggle to uphold the truth about Katyn, have particular right to expect a full legal rehabilitation of their murdered Relatives. We all share with them this expectation, as well as their expectation to have the rest of the documentation of this crime revealed and handed over to Polish historians.  

One could probably say that the dead do not need this rehabilitation any more, for it is so obvious that each of these deaths was a crime, that each verdict was a wickedness insulting all civilized moral and legal principles. It is the living who need that explicit act of legal rehabilitation, however, in order to make it clear that wickedness and crime have met with condemnation, that infamy is not upon the victims but upon their murderers, and that the criminal system which turned its leaders into the masters of life and death of individuals and nations has disappeared forever. 

The words of the Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska spring to mind: ‘People dealt this fate to people’. Standing here in Katyn, just as in Kharkiv or Mednoye, and soon probably also at Bykovnya near Kiev, we think of the horrible legacy of the 20th century totalitarian ideologies and systems. We think of the price that our nations have paid for freedom and dignity and about the road that humanity in our part of the world has travelled to make human rights and the rights of nations a value inviolable by any system or ideology. We think of the obligation that we have towards that evil past, about the memory of that past, but also about the hope for a brotherhood of people and nations that we want to bring about ourselves and to pass on to our children and grandchildren. 

What our nations, the Polish nation and the Russian nation, need is a difficult process of reconciliation built upon the foundation of truth and remembrance, but also on the strong will underpinned by the belief that it is both possible and expedient to achieve this reconciliation.

Reconciliation is a road towards a harmonious coexistence of nations in the future. There was much that used to divide us, the Poles and the Russians. However, we need to overcome the curse of historical determinism and cut the Gordian knot of lies right to the end.   

There is, and there will be, no consent to distorting history, to concealing facts or turning a blind eye to them. There is no reconciliation without the full truth. There are, and there will be, no compromises with the truth! There is no benefit so important as to make us renounce our identity, as Lech Kaczyński wrote: the truth about Katyn!

While respecting our mutual sensitivities, paying tribute today to the Polish heroes murdered at Katyn, let us proceed further along the road of truth towards Polish-Russian reconciliation. It is a long road and a difficult one, but it is worthy of our efforts and hope. 

We are meeting today to mark the end of the Katyn Year. This has been a very special year, overshadowed by the tragedy of the aeroplane crash on the 10th of April 2010. Therefore, it is worthwhile summing up, even if briefly, what we Poles have been able to achieve. 

Indeed, it is worthwhile going back in time a little further, to November 1989, when the first Polish non-communist prime minister paid tribute to those murdered here. I was a member of his retinue. I clearly remember how everything here was screaming with communist lie and with Polish pain. That is why one should note with great satisfaction and with great hope that last year the Polish and the Russian prime ministers were present at the cemetery of Polish officers, the cemetery that may today be shown as a standard for how to overcome an evil, dreadful past, as a standard for how to build a better future in the name of the truth. This is also a cemetery that may be a standard for those who want, also here in Russia, to make a reckoning with Stalinism and to sever all mental ties to it today. 

Today, the head of the Russian state, the Russian President, has been here for the first time. We can see the wreath that he laid here at the Polish cemetery. These are successive steps, important steps, steps in the right direction down the road that we have travelled for so many years. 

Fully appreciating the gesture made today by President Dmitry Medvedev, who also bowed his head before the murdered Polish heroes, we must think not only of the past but also of the future. 
We need not succumb to the fatalism of history, to the fatalism behind which there lurks a temptation of imperial domination or a fear of that domination. Even though a lot divided them in the past, Poland and Russia may now expand their relations in such a way as to overcome this fatalism of the past. Today from the Katyn forest that was the scene of the crime and that was meant to become a place of oblivion, we may emerge fortified with the truth about the heroic sacrifice of thousands of innocent prisoners of war. But also with obligations that our Compatriots’ bullet-pierced skulls impose upon us. An obligation to live in freedom, with respect for human rights and for the rights of nations to self-determination. An obligation to honestly remember the past and to build the future on the foundation of truth and reconciliation.  

Only a moment ago, the beautiful early spring sun was shining here. And I had this thought that those young people who were dying here in Polish uniforms, who were laying down their lives here at such a horrible moment, in such horrible surroundings, no doubt in utmost terror, most likely saw this Katyn forest and perhaps also the blue sky out of the corner of their eyes. And probably some of them, apart from the anxiety for their loved ones and for their homeland, apart from the fear of what lay ahead for them, may still have thought that the world might be beautiful, that it might be a world in which our good hopes were fulfilled, that this world might still come back. Standing today here at Katyn, I think it is up to us whether we make this world, seen also from Katyn, at least a little bit better.