| Personal diaries written by Polish officers before they were murdered in the Katyń massacre have been published in English for the first time. The moving entries written on scraps, notebooks and loose sheets of paper, reveal the everyday lives of the victims, revealing their thoughts, plans and dreams unaware of their fate....The Katyń massacre was a series of mass executions of up to 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the NKVD in April and May 1940. The killings took place at several locations but the massacre is named after the Katyń Forest in western Russia, where mass graves of the victims were first discovered in 1942 by Germans.
In one crate were 22 diaries and personal notes. Four copies of these were made soon afterwards in Kraków. The Home Army then delivered the copies to the Polish government in exile, in London. Sobieralski’s book contains English translations of twelve of those diaries.
When the diaries were discovered during the war, they were dirty and damaged after spending time buried in the ground.
A wartime forensics team in Krakow, headed by Dr. Jan Zygmunt Robel, was faced with the considerable task of preserving them. They spent many hours carefully bathing the fragments of paper in chemicals and then made four copies of the diaries.
According to Sobieralski, the original diaries have not survived. “In August 1944, the Germans took the crates with the various artefacts (including the diaries) to Silesia, and then further west. Apparently, they were all burned at Radebeul near Dresden,” he said.The copies, however, are held at the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London.
The book features seven illustrations by Rafał Mróz, which add an additional visual touch and help bring the diaries to life even more. As well as the diaries, the book contains short biographies of the diary authors, as well as a brief description of the Katyń Massacre.
From: The First News
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A Review of The Katyn Diaries:Miraculously survived, these twelve notebooks by the victims of the Katyn massacre reveal the details of their life in captivity, and document their subjective experiences. Frozen and underfed, these young officers took their ordeal with peace of mind. “This trip is not good at all”, wrote one of them. “Will they hand us over to the Germans? Will we sit here?”, asked another. “The Bolsheviks are generally decent people”. Though conditions were worsening, letters were permitted and, sometimes, actually arriving.
Crowded in the ruined monasteries, these Poles admired the beauty of the Russian woods and churches. They received vaccinations for typhus and watched Soviet films with the titles such as “Golden Taiga” or “Great Comrade”. They wrote down their nightdreams and even organised “spiritualist seances“ to see their dear ones. Until the last moments, they did not anticipate their forthcoming end. Carefully translated and commented by a grandson of Polish refugees to England, this stunning collection will be cherished by its readers.
Alexander Etkind
Professor of History, European University Institute in Florence
FROM THE DIARY. On Poland’s independence day on 11 November, Lieutenant Maksymilian Trzepałka wrote: “Captivity is terrible, losing freedom. We held a small service in the barrack. In the evening a colonel recited a poem, and a friend (a singer from Poznań) sang a few songs.”
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