Katyn

Again The Times prints an article about Soviet admission of guilt in regards to the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers in 1940. As we know from first-hand accounts, only 4,443 bodies of the 15,131 missing officers were ever found at that site. What happened to the others? Some have speculated that the officers were taken to the White Sea, loaded onto barges, towed out to sea and sunk by Soviet artillery.

Even after midnight and despite a stiff breeze chilling the capital, Poles continued to pour into the streets as a nation in mourning showed no sign of letting up on its display of grief. Elderly women clutching icons of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, young couples with tulips and children carrying crayon drawings of remembrance streamed through Warsaw's squares. They placed their offerings at makeshift shrines to the victims of a plane crash that robbed their country of much of its elite.

The bodies of 3,311 World War II Polish officers and soldiers were found in five mass graves in the Lithuanian village of Kalety, Polish television reported. The report quoted people who claimed to be witnesses as saying the victims were shot by Soviet troops. It did not say how or when the graves were discovered. More than 15,000 Polish officers were interned in three Soviet camps in the Ukraine during World War II and subsequently disappeared.

The presidents of Poland and Russia, marking the opening of a cemetery for thousands of Poles killed by Soviet security forces in 1940, vowed Sunday to seek reconciliation between their countries. Poland's Lech Walesa laid the cornerstone at the cemetery in Katyn forest about 250 miles west of Moscow where 4,400 Polish army officers were shot and killed. Walesa condemned the murder of 15,000 Polish army officers in all by Russian forces.

The government has discreetly erected a 12-foot marble cross in memory of 4,000 army officers who died in a World War II massacre officially blamed on the Nazis but blamed by many Poles on Soviet troops, dissident sources said today. The monument was erected in the Warsaw Powazki Cemetery and the unveiling ceremony took place in almost complete secrecy, apparently to avoid drawing crowds and attention to the event, the sources said.

Re "Once Again, the Big Yalta Lie," Commentary, May 10: I read with particular disgust The Times' desperate defense of President Franklin Roosevelt's deplorable actions at the Yalta summit. You state that Roosevelt was "naive" in his dealings with Josef Stalin. At the same time, you explicitly mention the slaughter of Polish officers in the forests of Katyn, an act to which Roosevelt conveniently failed to respond. So which is it? Was the Katyn massacre evidence of Roosevelt's intentions, or was Roosevelt naive?

On Aug. 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact that contained a secret agreement for the partition of Poland. On Sept. 1 Germany invaded Poland, and shortly after that the Soviet army moved in from the east to complete the conquest. More than 180,000 Polish soldiers were taken captive by the Russians. Among them were nearly 15,000 officers, many of them reservists, who were interned in western Russia.

It seems a strange place to learn history, Communist-style history, but a military cemetery in Warsaw teaches the complex web of Poland's past with an unmistakable Soviet slant. Many monuments dot the Powazki military cemetery commemorating Polish bravery against the Germans in both world wars. One contains the ashes of Poles who died in concentration camps throughout Europe. Another commemorates those who died fighting Ukrainian Nazis.

It seems a strange place to learn history, Communist-style history, but a military cemetery in Warsaw teaches the complex web of Poland's past with an unmistakable Soviet slant. Many monuments dot the Powazki military cemetery commemorating Polish bravery against the Germans in both world wars. One contains the ashes of Poles who died in concentration camps throughout Europe. Another commemorates those who died fighting Ukrainian Nazis.

There were 6,295 Polish prisoners held captive at the monastery when the order came to "unload" the camp. It took a month and a half to kill all of them. The prisoners were mostly military officers, police, gendarmes and landlords, rounded up as a dangerous "bourgeois" elite when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in the run-up to World War II. The following year, 1940, the Communist Party decided to eliminate them.