The Katyn Order (53 page)

“The lectures in Germany . . .” he started to say; then his voice trailed off. He slumped in the chair and was silent for a long time.

Then he abruptly shoved the chair back and stood up, ramrod straight. He jabbed a finger in the air and screamed, “That fucking Himmler!” He paced around the room, whispering something to himself, then stopped next to my chair, looked down at me and said that he was to remain as Governor of Poland. He asked what I thought of that but continued on without waiting for an answer. He said that he will have no power in the party but will remain as governor of Germany's largest occupied territory. “Who has ever heard of such madness?” he said.

I believe Frank is losing his mind.

It has been three months since my last entry. On most days I am too tired to write. Life has dragged on, one dreary day after another. “Night duty” continues, and the channel remains intact. I have been assured that the documents I am risking my life (such as it is) to smuggle from the library are being passed on, but the brutal oppression of the citizens of Poland continues. Deportations from the Krakow ghetto have begun, and I have heard rumors that as many as fifteen thousand Jews have already been sent “to the east.” No one knows where they are really going, but my heart sinks when I remember Frank telling me about the “final solution.” How can this madness continue? Is it possible that the rest of the world doesn't know? Or don't they care?

Frank came into the library early this morning. I had not seen him since that day in August when he had been stripped of his party offices. But today he was in a jovial and expansive mood, talking rapidly about how well the war effort is going, how the Russians will soon be defeated. We sat at a table in the Reading Room, and he pulled his chair close. He whispered that he had a visitor recently, a Russian visitor.

I didn't know what to say so I remained silent, knowing this was generally the best course of action when Frank was in a talkative mood. He continued whispering even though there was no one else nearby. He said that his Russian visitor had brought him a gift as a token of his friendship. The Russian had asked for his protection when the Bolshevik empire collapses under the might of the Wehrmacht.

Another five months have passed since my last writing. I fear that this journal has lapsed into tedium, but such is my life. I continue to work in the library six days a week, with “night duty” as usual. The rest of the time, I sleep. My friend Jerzy Jastremski and his wife continue to invite me to supper at their apartment, but I usually decline. I am too tired to be a good conversationalist. And I have developed a hacking cough. Jerzy wants me to see a doctor (it is allowed for workers in the library), but I fear being sent to the hospital. I remember the “hospital” at Sachsenhausen, from which no one ever returned.

Frank visited the library this evening. I was gathering up my things to leave when he motioned for me to accompany him as he walked down one of the corridors. I followed him, waiting as always for him to initiate the conversation. After several minutes he stopped and said that the German Wehrmacht made a discovery in Russia a few days ago. It was a mass grave in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. He said the Russians had murdered more than four thousand Polish army officers back in 1940. They were shot in the head and dumped in a ditch. Frank said that Stalin is blaming Germany, but it was the Russians who committed the murders.

The news was like a blow to the stomach. I could barely breathe as I thought of the many Polish officers I knew, some of them sons of my closest friends, fine young men in the prime of their lives and professional careers. Is this what happened to them? Were they put down like dogs and left to rot in a ditch? I looked away and blinked several times, trying to clear the tears from my eyes.

Frank, of course, was oblivious to my discomfort. He said that he had known about the murders for some time. He asked if I recalled his visitor last November. Thanks to this visitor and the gift he brought, Frank said, he has proof that it was the
Russians
who committed this despicable act. He said that proof—solid evidence—was always useful.

I return to the journal now after almost two years because something happened today that may actually provide meaning for my continued existence. For the last two years I have slogged through life, merely staying alive on the slim hope that Beata and Adam have managed to survive. And so I have kept on, one day after another.

Today I discovered the “solid evidence” Hans Frank boasted about back in April of 1943. It is a carbon copy of a single document authorizing the massacre in the Katyn Forest! I found it neatly folded in a non-descript envelope intermixed with dozens of other envelopes and file folders in the final box of documents left on the table in room L-3.

I was just in time. The Nazi occupiers are cleaning out everything: their headquarters at Wawel Castle, their personal homes and apartments, even the storage rooms at the library. The streets of Krakow are clogged with all manner of German vehicles piled high with furniture, silverware, paintings and rolls of carpets—rats hoarding their booty before jumping ship as the Red Army closes in. But what is to become of
us?

The Nazis are gone—just like that, Hans Frank among them—in a frenzied exodus from the city. After more than five years, the streets of Krakow are now devoid of the black uniforms of the SS and the green uniforms of the Feldgendarmes. It will be several days, I'm told, before the khaki uniforms of the Red Army and NKVD fill these same streets. I will not be here to see it.

When I removed that document from that final box in room L-3, I instantly knew that this was what Frank had alluded to—the proof he had received from his Russian visitor.

And I knew why I had survived. I
must
make sure this piece of evidence is shown to the people of the world, that they may see the true nature of Stalin and his henchmen—barbarians every bit as evil as the Nazis they have just defeated. Perhaps this damning evidence, exposed in the court of world opinion, will convince the Americans and British to stand up to Stalin and deny his ruthless ambitions for Poland.

I have translated the document. It took more than two hours, and when I finished I was shaking so badly I dropped the thin piece of paper on the floor. I picked it up and read it a second time, scarcely able to believe that such a thing would ever be put on paper.

The translation of the entire document is too long to include in this journal, but this is the essence of its contents:

On 5 March, 1940, at the request of NKVD Commissar Lavrenty Beria, an order was signed by Joseph Stalin and every other member of the Soviet Politburo, authorizing the execution of twenty-seven thousand Polish “nationalists and counterrevolutionaries.” The various groups of Poles and their places of execution were itemized—including the four thousand officers of the Polish army whose graves were discovered by the Germans in the Katyn Forest.

I need worry no longer about the safety of my beloved Beata. Before departing yesterday, Herr Kruger did me one last service and told me the truth. Beata died more than two years ago at the concentration camp at Dachau. Though hearing of her death ripped my soul apart, I was not surprised. I realize that all of Frank's comments about Beata returning were designed to keep me in a state of perpetual fear and to prevent me from communicating with anyone. I only thank the Lord that she is at peace. I asked Herr Kruger about the whereabouts of my nephew, Adam, but he was not able to furnish any information.

Now, I have but one last thing for which to live. This will be my final entry of the journal. I have been up all night, and I know what I must do. The copy of Stalin's order authorizing the massacre in the Katyn Forest must not fall into Russian hands.

To whoever reads this journal: find Adam Nowak and tell him that we shall never be pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard of the NKVD.

Ludwik Banach

Professor of Law, Jagiellonian University

Member, Polish Bar Association

The incident that has become known as the Katyn Massacre was, without a doubt, one of the most heinous war crimes ever committed. More than twenty thousand Polish Army officers and civilians were secretly murdered by the Soviet NKVD during April and May of 1940. The murders were actually carried out at several different sites in Russia.

In addition to the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, where the graves of more than four thousand Polish officers were discovered, at least three thousand persons were murdered at a secret camp near Starobelsk, six thousand at a camp near Ostashkov, and as many as fourteen thousand at other places of detention. In addition to army officers, the victims included chaplains, university professors, physicians, lawyers, engineers, teachers, writers and journalists.

This unprecedented crime was initially discovered by the German Wehrmacht as they advanced through Russia in April 1943. The Soviet Government denied any knowledge of the incident and claimed that the murders had been committed by the Germans.

The Polish Government-in-Exile, and in particular Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski, had been pressing the Soviet Government for years about the apparent disappearance of Poland's army officers. The discovery of the graves in 1943 heightened the controversy and eventually led to Joseph Stalin's decision to break off diplomatic relations with Poland. On 4 July 1943, Prime Minister Sikorski was killed in an airplane crash seconds after takeoff from an airfield in Gibraltar. The incident has never been completely explained.

The controversy over the Katyn Massacre continued until 13 April 1990, when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev publicly acknowledged the Soviet Union's responsibility for the murders. On 14 October 1992, fifty-two years after the secret murders were committed, the Soviet Government finally produced the order of 5 March 1940, which authorized the execution of more than twenty-seven thousand Polish “nationalists and counterrevolutionaries,” including the Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. The order was drafted by the Commissar of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, and was signed by Joseph Stalin, along with every member of the Soviet Politburo.

The horror of Katyn continues to this day. In April 2010, the president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, along with his wife and more than ninety other Polish dignitaries, died in an airplane crash in Russia. They were en route to a ceremony commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre. On 26 November 2010, the Russian parliament officially condemned Joseph Stalin by name for the mass execution of Poles at Katyn. The parliament declared that the Soviet dictator and other Soviet officials had ordered the “Katyn crime” in 1940.

In writing
The Katyn Order,
I chose to begin the story with another great tragedy of World War Two, the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Like the Katyn massacre, the facts of the Warsaw Rising were suppressed for decades after the war by the communist authorities governing Poland. Consequently, the story of the Rising is not well known in the West, and is often confused with the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943. They were, in fact, two completely different events.

By the summer of 1944, it was clear that Germany would be defeated by the Allies. American and British forces were liberating France, Belgium and the Netherlands, while Soviet forces were pushing into Poland. The German Army was in retreat. Having no illusions about what “liberation” by the Soviets would mean for their future, Poland's home army, the AK, acting on instructions from their Government-in-Exile in London, attempted to seize the opportunity to take control of their capital. What ensued was the Warsaw Rising, a catastrophe of epic proportions, that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of lives, and the destruction of one of the world's great cities. Winston Churchill, who agonized over the struggle for Poland's capital as it unfolded day-after-tragic-day, described it this way in his memoirs:

The struggle in Warsaw had lasted more than sixty days. Of the 40,000 men and women of the Polish Underground Army, 15,000 fell . . . The suppression of the revolt cost the German Army 10,000 killed, 7,000 missing and 9,000 wounded. The proportions attest to the hand-to-hand nature of the fighting. When the Russians entered the city three months later, they found nothing but the shattered streets and the unburied dead. Such was their liberation of Poland, where they now rule. But this cannot be the end of the story.

For more information on the Warsaw Rising, consult the website,
www.warsawuprising.com
.

The Katyn Order
is a work of fiction. The order signed by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Politburo is an historical fact. Whether a copy of the order ever existed, however, is a matter of the author's speculation. The characters in this story are fictitious, but all of the events are true and the majority of places described are real, as far as my research could confirm. There are a few notable exceptions: the Copernicus Memorial Library in Krakow and the Tatra Mountain village of Prochowa are products of my imagination, as are the Church of the Sacred Mother, the Polonia Bank, and the Bomb Shelter Pub in Warsaw. I also elected to have the dining room of the Adlon Hotel survive the fire.

Ludwik Banach is also a fictitious character, as is his relationship with the real historical person Hans Frank. Banach's journal is fictitious, but it incorporates many historical facts, including the arrest of more than two hundred Polish intellectuals by the Nazis, and the existence of the Sachsenhausen prison camp and the Academy of German Law.