AP News, November 14th, 2007
Parliament on Wednesday established an annual day of remembrance for more than 14,000 Polish officers who were captured at the start of World War II and killed by Soviet secret police in the Katyn forest.
Members of the 460-member lower house, or Sejm, agreed to make April 13 an annual "Day of Remembrance of Victims of the Katyn Crime," one of the most painful episodes in Poland's history.
Lawmakers stood and applauded, approving the resolution by acclamation.
The day will honor Polish army, police, border and prison guard officers killed by Soviet leader Josef Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, in April and May of 1940 in the Katyn forest outside Smolensk and at other places in the Soviet Union. The killings have become known in Poland as the "Katyn Crime."
The remembrance day is "in homage to the Katyn Crime victims and in memory of all those who were murdered by the NKVD on the March 5, 1940, orders by the Soviet Union authorities," the resolution said.
On April 13, 1990, the Soviet Union's Tass news agency issued a statement, based on archival research by historians, blaming the Katyn killings on Soviet secret security leaders.
That marked a sharp about-face for Moscow, which for decades had blamed the killings on Nazi Germany and imprisoned those who spoke the truth about it.
An estimated 22,000 Polish officers were taken prisoner by the Soviet army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939, two weeks after Nazi Germany overran western Poland, starting World War II.
Polish officials say all the prisoners were slain, but only about 14,000 bodies have been found — and identified — in mass graves near Katyn, Mednoye and Kharkov, now in Ukraine. The search continues for more burial sites.
In a two-day ceremony last week, President Lech Kaczynski gave posthumous promotions to the 14,000 identified officers.
