Katyn

If I hadn't read about the recently released film, "Katyn", I'd not have paid much attention to this monument to war dead. There are so many of them scattered around Europe, that this would not have stood out except for its design and the explanation for it: the 22,000 Polish officers and officials executed by the Russians in 1940. But there it was, in bronze, the bound man with his hads behind his back and the hole in his head, with the angel of death above him. (That's not shown in the photograph) Reading, thinking, I realised that I didn't know the reason behind the massacre, nor the background to the Russians having Polish PoWs.

I frequently become annoyed at Americans who think of the last war as having lasted from 1941-46, and who don't know of the involvement of Russia, or who express surprise that British cities were bombed (The Blitz was the equivalent of a 9/11 every day for three months) and who think that they alone liberated France.

The story of Katyn made me realise that I'm just as woefully ignorant as anyone else: although I knew that Poland was invaded by the Germans in September 1939, sparking WWII, I hadn't realised that the Russians also invaded two weeks later. And I was surprised at how much the Poles I knew disliked Russia. It's time to revise my knowledge of the history of central Europe.

:o(