In the Shadow of Katyn

In the Shadow of Katyn PDF Author: Stanisław Swianiewicz
Publisher: Pender Island, B.C. : Borealis Pub.
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description

In the Shadow of Katyn

In the Shadow of Katyn PDF Author: Stanisław Swianiewicz
Publisher: Pender Island, B.C. : Borealis Pub.
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description


Surviving Katyn

Surviving Katyn PDF Author: Jane Rogoyska
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1786078937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 502

Get Book Here

Book Description
WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE ‘A gripping reconstruction… utterly compelling reading.’ Adam Zamoyski ‘This is a grim story, thoroughly researched and brilliantly told.’ Geoffrey Alderman, Times Higher Education The Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnesses. Committed in utmost secrecy in April–May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake – the few survivors of the massacre and the Polish wartime forensic investigators – whose quest for the truth in the face of an inscrutable, unknowable, and utterly ruthless enemy came at great personal cost.

Remembering Katyn

Remembering Katyn PDF Author: Alexander Etkind
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566296X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Get Book Here

Book Description
Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn. Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.

Katyn

Katyn PDF Author: Wojciech Materski
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300151853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Union carried out the mass executions of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war - army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians - taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. This work details the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up of the crime, and the subsequent revelations.

Katyn

Katyn PDF Author: Allen Paul
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501757202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description


When God Looked the Other Way

When God Looked the Other Way PDF Author: Wesley Adamczyk
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022634150X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
Often overlooked in accounts of World War II is the Soviet Union's quiet yet brutal campaign against Polish citizens, a campaign that included, we now know, war crimes for which the Soviet and Russian governments only recently admitted culpability. Standing in the shadow of the Holocaust, this episode of European history is often overlooked. Wesley Adamczyk's gripping memoir, When God Looked the Other Way, now gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Soviet barbarism. Adamczyk was a young Polish boy when he was deported with his mother and siblings from their comfortable home in Luck to Soviet Siberia in May of 1940. His father, a Polish Army officer, was taken prisoner by the Red Army and eventually became one of the victims of the Katyn massacre, in which tens of thousands of Polish officers were slain at the hands of the Soviet secret police. The family's separation and deportation in 1940 marked the beginning of a ten-year odyssey in which the family endured fierce living conditions, meager food rations, chronic displacement, and rampant disease, first in the Soviet Union and then in Iran, where Adamczyk's mother succumbed to exhaustion after mounting a harrowing escape from the Soviets. Wandering from country to country and living in refugee camps and the homes of strangers, Adamczyk struggled to survive and maintain his dignity amid the horrors of war. When God Looked the Other Way is a memoir of a boyhood lived in unspeakable circumstances, a book that not only illuminates one of the darkest periods of European history but also traces the loss of innocence and the fight against despair that took root in one young boy. It is also a book that offers a stark picture of the unforgiving nature of Communism and its champions. Unflinching and poignant, When God Looked the Other Way will stand as a testament to the trials of a family during wartime and an intimate chronicle of episodes yet to receive their historical due. “Adamczyk recounts the story of his own wartime childhood with exemplary precision and immense emotional sensitivity, presenting the ordeal of one family with the clarity and insight of a skilled novelist. . . . I have read many descriptions of the Siberian odyssey and of other forgotten wartime episodes. But none of them is more informative, more moving, or more beautifully written than When God Looked the Other Way.”—From the Foreword by Norman Davies, author of Europe: A History and Rising ’44: TheBattleforWarsaw “A finely wrought memoir of loss and survival.”—Publishers Weekly “Adamczyk’s unpretentious prose is well-suited to capture that truly awful reality.” —Andrew Wachtel, Chicago Tribune Books “Mr. Adamczyk writes heartfelt, straightforward prose. . . . This book sheds light on more than one forgotten episode of history.”—Gordon Haber, New York Sun “One of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face.”—Andrew Beichman, Washington Times

The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre

The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre PDF Author: Grover Furr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692134252
Category : Katyn Massacre, Katynʹ, Russia, 1940
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
In April 1943, German authorities claimed that they had found the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish prisoners of war buried near Katyn, in the Western Soviet Union. The Polish exile government in London agreed with the Germans. In January, 1944, Soviet authorities issued a report claiming that the Germans had murdered the Polish POWs. In 1990-92 Soviet, then Russian authorities agreed that the Soviets were indeed the guilty party. But by 2010 serious evidence had been discovered that cast doubt on Soviet guilt. There has never been an objective, thorough study of this mystery - until now. All mainstream accounts blame the USSR - Stalin - for the deaths, while all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Grover Furr has identified, obtained, and studied all the evidence, and has also studied all the supposedly "authoritative" scholarly accounts of Katyn, with skill and - what is most important - with objectivity. In this book he lays out the evidence and solves this mystery for once and for all.

The Katyn Forest Massacre: an Annotated Bibliography of Books in English

The Katyn Forest Massacre: an Annotated Bibliography of Books in English PDF Author: Andrew Kavchak
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
On 23 August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty. As part of their agreement, secret protocols delineated their respective spheres of influence over the territory between them. On 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany launched the Second World War by invading Poland from the West. On 17 September the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East. The two totalitarian powers split Poland between them. Approximately 250,000 Polish soldiers were captured by the Red Army. About 15,000 military officers, police officers and border guards were segregated and interned in three camps: Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov. On March 5, 1940 NKVD Chief Beria provided Stalin with a written proposal to execute the Poles at the three camps as well as thousands of other Polish prisoners in the jails of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine. Beria described the Polish prisoners as "sworn enemies of Soviet power, filled with hatred for the Soviet system of government". He proposed to "apply to them the supreme punishment, shooting". In the operation that followed in April and May 1940, 21,857 Poles were shot by the NKVD and buried in hidden mass graves.On 22 June 1941 the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. The Soviets then agreed to release the Poles in Soviet captivity and allow General Władysław Anders to assume the command of a Polish Army to be formed on Soviet territory. But where were the officers who were held at Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov? Polish efforts to find them to them were futile as the Soviet authorities dodged the issue and gave evasive answers. On 13 April 1943 the Nazis announced a gruesome discovery in the Katyn Forest where they found mass graves containing the bodies of thousands of Polish officers from the Kozelsk camp. The Germans claimed the Polish officers were killed by the Soviets. The Soviets responded by claiming that the Nazis had captured and killed the Polish officers in 1941. This "Katyn Lie" would be official Soviet and Communist narrative on the subject for the next 47 years. On 13 April 1990 Soviet President Gorbachev provided the Polish Government with documents confirming that the Soviets were responsible for the Katyn Massacre. On 14 October 1992 Russian President Yeltsin revealed the text of execution order of March 5, 1940, signed by Stalin.The Katyn Forest Massacre: An Annotated Bibliography of Books in English begins with a history of the Katyn Massacre and an overview of the literature on Katyn. The subsequent chapters discuss the authors and contents of some 38 books that have been published over the decades in English about Katyn. Each book contributed something to the evolving literature and general knowledge about the history of the Massacre. Books were written by some prisoners who survived (Czapski and Młynarski), witnesses who were brought to the exhumations (Stroobant and Werth), diplomats and generals who tried to find out what happened to the missing officers (Kot and Anders), family members who were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia (Adamczyk), researchers and historians (Zawodny, Ciencala, Sanford and Maresch), and authors who believed that raising awareness about Katyn was worthwhile because it might help rectify an injustice (FitzGibbon and Allen). Books written before the Soviet admission of guilt pointed an accusatory finger at the Kremlin. Those written afterwards had the benefit of archival revelations that helped shed light on previously unknown details of the NKVD Katyn operation. The Foreword is by Dr. Alexander M. Jablonski, President of the Oskar Halecki Institute in Canada. Andrew Kavchak studied political science (M.A., Carleton University) and law (LL.B., Osgoode Hall Law School). His grandfather was among the Polish officers held at Starobelsk and murdered at Kharkov in April 1940 in what has become known as the Katyn Massacre.

Bloodlands

Bloodlands PDF Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465032974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

Katyn Killings

Katyn Killings PDF Author: John H. Lauck
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description