Katyn Forest Massacre Memorial

The Katyn Memorial at Exchange Place in Jersey City, New Jersey

Dedicated to the victims of the Katyn massacre (1940), this memorial was created by the Polish-American sculptor Andrzej Pitynski and was unveiled in 1991. It stands near the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in the Exchange Place section of Jersey City, New Jersey.

In the spring of 1940, following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, some 22,000 Polish prisoners were executed on the orders of Josef Stalin, prompted by the head of the Soviet secret police (NKVD), Lavrentiy Beria. These prisoners included much of the Polish officer corps as well as many members of Poland's intellectual class. The mass executions took place in the Katyn Forest in Russia, as well as in several prison camps in the USSR.

The Katyn Memorial also honors Poles who were deported to Siberia. The bronze statue atop the granite base of the memorial depicts a Polish soldier bound, gagged, and bayoneted through the back.

Poland Daily May 6th: The Mayor of Jersey City wants the Katyn Memorial gone by Tuesday

According to sources close to the historian Sławomir Cenckiewicz , the Mayor of Jersey City Steven Fulop, wants the Katyn Memorial to be removed as soon as on Tuesday.

The momunent commemorates 22 000 Poles killed by the Soviets in 1940

Katyn Massacre Memorial 2019

NJ GOP State Committeeman Joshua Sotomayor Einstein speaks at Katyn Forest Massacre Memorial service.

POLAND DAILY May 8th 2018: Polish American community fight back against New Jersey mayor

The Polish-American community is fighting back against the mayor of Jersey City, Steven Fulop, who has planned to remove the Katyn Memorial from the city's waterfront. Organizations, such as the Coalition of Polish Americans, the Katyn Forest Massacre Memorial Committee and American Jewish Congress in Central Europe, have also criticized the Mayor's scandalous decision.

Katyn (1940) - History Presentation

This video is a presentation of the history of the Katyn forest massacre of 1940 in which the Soviet NKVD murdered approximately 15,000 Polish officers from three camps and over 6,000 Poles held in prisons in occupied Eastern Poland (Belarus and Ukraine). The presentation is an overview which covers events before and during World War II, as well as how the matter was treated after the war. The presentation is made using a deck, and concludes with pictures of the Polish military cemeteries in Katyn, Kharkov and Mednoe, as well as three Katyn monuments in the UK, the USA, and Canada.

Reaction to declassification of memos showing US hushed up Soviet massacre

(11 Sep 2012) Polish Americans and officials celebrated the release of long classified US documents that lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the US government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22-thousand Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.
The evidence is among about 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the United States National Archives released on Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press.
Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur called the release a momentous occasion in an effort to make known to the families of the victims, the people of Poland and the entire world a clearer story behind the massacre.
Katyn was a horrific act against the leadership community of Poland and a people who had already suffered more than their share of grief and oppression, said Kaptur in her opening remarks.
Yet, the full truth of what happened at Katyn during World War II was long concealed from the families of the victims, from the people of Poland and from the world.
Kaptur helped lead a recent push for the release of the documents.
The Soviets had accused Nazi Germany of the massacre.
We have come a long way from the time when this atrocity was falsely presented as a German Nazi crime, said Maciej Pisarski, the acting Charge d'Affaires at Poland's embassy to the US.
Even though the truth about the hastily buried bones of Poland's best and brightest has prevailed, more must still be done to set the record straight, he said.
Pisarski said he hopes that the release of these documents might inspire other governments and institutions around the world to release any classified information they might still have that could shed light on the massacre and apparent US cover-up.
The most dramatic revelation so far is the evidence of secret codes sent by two American Prisoners of War - something historians were unaware of and which adds to evidence that the Roosevelt administration knew of the Soviet atrocity relatively early on.
A group of American and British POWs were taken against their will by their German captors to witness a horrifying scene at a clearing surrounded by pine trees: mass graves tightly packed with thousands of partly mummified corpses in well-tailored Polish officers uniforms.
The Germans were hoping to use the POWs for propaganda, and to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western Allies.
Realising and now documenting that these US army officers allowed the US army and government to know in the summer of '43 what had actually happened is a devastating thought because it confirms that there was a deceitful programme in place from the start, said Krystyna Piorkowska, a researcher who has written about the slaughter at Katyn.
Piorkowska also addressed the gathering on behalf of the Federation of Katyn Families, a loosely tied organisation that represents various groups around the world that advocate for relatives of Katyn victims.
The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.
In the early years after the war, outrage by some American officials over the concealment inspired the creation of a special US Congressional committee to investigate Katyn.
In a final report released in 1952, the committee declared there was no doubt of Soviet guilt, and called the massacre one of the most barbarous international crimes in world history.
It found that Roosevelt's administration suppressed public knowledge of the crime, but said it was out of military necessity.
Their loss has proven an enduring wound to the Polish nation.


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Grover Furr on the Katyn massacre hoax

Grover Carr Furr III (born April 3, 1944) is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University, best known for his books on Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. He has published many books on this subject.

Holocaust Survivor Leopold Page Testimony

This testimony from Schindler's List survivor Leopold Page is from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. View his testimony to learn more about his experiences.

Genocides in history | Wikipedia audio article

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Genocides in history

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- Socrates



SUMMARY
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Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the groups conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.The preamble to the CPPCG states that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world and that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity.Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. In nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the details and interpretation of the event, often to the point of depicting wildly different versions of the facts.