Word: katyn
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...decades the word Katyn, for the Poles, has stood for an unspeakable crime as well as tragedy. Henceforth, it will stand also for an additional national disaster - but perhaps also for hope...
...past, Katyn signified mass murder committed in 1940 in a forest just west of the Russian town of Smolensk by troops of the Soviet Union, who killed defenseless Polish prisoners of war. The victims of the atrocity accounted for much of Poland's military as well as intellectual elite. The second Katyn tragedy - the April 10 crash on the approach to Smolensk airport of a plane carrying dignitaries to a ceremony commemorating that very 1940 massacre - led to the death of nearly 100 of the top political personalities of a newly independent, and once again democratic, Poland. Those who died...
...days before the second tragedy, the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, and the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, met to formalize a protracted process of painful accommodation regarding the Katyn crime. What happened in the forest 70 years ago was for many years a forbidden fact of life in Polish society. From the end of World War II to 1989, Poland was politically subservient to the Soviet Union. Even the closest relatives of those who perished at Katyn were not allowed to talk about it. People who claimed that their fathers or grandfathers had died on a certain date...
...spoke well. But he still spoke more as a statesman doing what was needed; somehow, he did not really connect, in a human sense, with the Poles. By contrast, within hours of the fatal plane crash outside Smolensk three days later, Putin himself was on the spot in Katyn, reaching out to the Poles in a spontaneously warm and compassionate fashion. That all of a sudden infused human feelings into an issue that had divided the two peoples. (See TIME's Poland covers...
...brief, maybe someday there will be a memorial in Katyn to all its victims: the earlier ones, whose death and suffering in 1940 was ignored for so long and even lied about, and the more recent ones, who perished on a mission of peace in 2010. If so, Katyn will have at last earned a more hopeful place in Europe's collective memory...