Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Tragedy and the Irony



Seventy years ago in April of 1940, Stalin gave the orders for nearly 22,000 Polish War prisoners to be executed at Katyn and various other sites. In this group were Polish military personnel and Polish civilians that had been captured after the Russian invasion of Poland in 1939. Many had been made to dig their own mass graves, and then were shot in the back of the head.

The Soviets denied charges made against them by Germany in 1943, and America and England dismissed the claims. It was not until 1990 that the Kremlin publicly admitted complicity to some of the charges in the killings in the Katyn Forest.

There is an interesting and disturbing article about this massacre posted on the Hoover Institution - Stanford University site.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3486292.html

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The Polish people gather by the thousands to mourn their loss

On Saturday morning April 10, 2010, the Polish plane carrying about 96 passengers, including the Polish President, Lech Kaczynski and his wife, many of Poland's military, political, and religious leaders, and members of the families of Katyn victims crashed killing all. They were to attend a commemoration service at the mass grave in the Katyn forest for those that had been executed in April of 1940, a few miles from where there plane went down.

4 comments:

  1. Mya some stories just leaves me speechless!

    How tragic! and yes how Ironic is that, for the plane to crash on it's way to the ceremonial site! How very, very sad..

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  2. We have seen all about this tragic event on the newshere in Italy.
    I have found your interesting Blog, thanks to you dropping by mine and commenting. Comments are much appreciated and I do hope you will visit me again.
    I will certainly be back here as now following :)

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  3. It has always amazed me from my childhood until my adult life, how one group of people can hate another so much that they could devise such horrendous crimes upon those people.
    I can never wrap my mind around it...

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  4. P.S I did get a kick out of that ' Stone Art blog' Those Buddha pears are awesome! I would love to have them for a garden picnic and watch the faces of my guest as they Ooo" and ah' them.

    How unique.

    ReplyDelete