- Katyn war cemetery
Katyn war cemetery is a Polish
military cemetery located in Katyn, a small village 22 kilometres away fromSmolensk ,Russia , on the road toVitebsk . It contains the remnants of 4,412 Polish officers of theKozelsk prisoner of war camp, who were murdered in1940 in what is called theKatyn massacre . Except for bodies of two Polish generals exhumed by German authorities in the 1940s and then buried separately, all Polish officers murdered in Katyn were buried in six largemass grave s. There is also a Russian part of the cemetery, where an undisclosed number of victims of the SovietGreat Purges of the 1930's were buried by theNKVD . The cemetery was officially opened in2000 .The cemetery is a large, irregular area covering roughly 22 hectares of forest. All mass graves are located on both sides of the main alley. There is also a circular alley with thousands of names of the officers who perished in the massacre. At the end of the main alley there is a
war memorial and analtar with a memorial bell located underground.History
Initially, after the exhumation of
1943 , the Germans had permitted thePolish Red Cross to build a cemetery on the spot. However, following the Soviet take-over of the area it was destroyed and most evidence removed. The area was again forested and civilians were banned from entering the area. As the knowledge of the massacre was suppressed in Communist countries, in1976 thePolish Government in Exile awarded the Katyn Memorial inLondon with the cross ofVirtuti Militari , the highest Polish military award.Following Soviet admittance of the crime in 1991, the exhumation and archaeological works were resumed. In
1994 a bi-lateral treaty on war cemeteries and war memorials was concluded betweenPoland andRussia . This paved the way for a construction of a proper war cemetery inKatyn . After several years of construction it was opened to the public onJuly 28 ,2000 . That year also similar cemetery was opened in other mass murder sites of Piatikhatki (near Kharkiv),Smolensk , andMednoye . The Virtuti Militari awarded to the monument in London was then transferred to Katyn, which became one of the very few places in the world among its recipients.During the opening ceremony the spot was visited by the highest Polish and Russian authorities. Among them were the Prime Ministers
Jerzy Buzek andViktor Khristenko , as well as Marshals of Sejm (Maciej Płażyński ) and Senate (Alicja Grześkowiak ). The ceremony was opened by the Polish Chief of General Staff Gen.Henryk Szumski and concluded with a Catholic mass celebrated by theprimate of Poland Józef Glemp , while the Orthodox ceremony byMetropolitan bishop ofSmolensk Cyril Gundyaev . There were also prayers of other denominations held, as there were alsoProtestant , Muslim andJewish victims of the NKVD buried there.
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