| Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin's Polish Massacre |  | Author: Allen Paul
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Category: Book
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 924449
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 390
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0684192152
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5405094762
EAN: 9780684192154
ASIN: 0684192152
Publication Date: August 1991
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 A Chilling Indictment May 5, 2003
Kurt Harding (Boerne TX)
26 out of 28 found this review helpful
Fifty eight years after the end of WWII, the holocaust remains under constant public scrutiny while most other of the almost innumerable atrocities of that great conflict continue to be either ignored or pooh-poohed by those who continue to rationalize them for personal political reasons. Because of the incessant yowling about the holocaust, people tend to forget that many people suffered on all sides during the war. Jews were neither the only victims, nor were they even the war's chief victims.
Of the belligerents, Germany, Russia, and Poland suffered the greatest human and material losses. Of the three, only Poland was blameless in the end for the death and destruction wrought by a war which passed over its territory twice in five years.
Most of us have at least heard about the massacre of Polish officers, professionals, and intelligentsia by the Soviets at Katyn Forest. Had it not been for a fortuitous find by German forces occupying that part of the Soviet Union and the meticulous way in which they handled it, we might today be saying that Katyn was just another one of Hitler's monstrous crimes.
In Katyn:The Untold Story Of Stalin's Polish Massacre, Allen Paul puts human faces on the victims by introducing us to some of them and their families before the war begins and then following the odyssies of the families and their men as both are arrested and deported as war begins and the invading Communists seek to purge Poland of class enemies and those who might in the future oppose them. (One family lives out the war in the German General Government, but the man of the house had been arrested in Lwow by the Soviets and eventually became a victim of the murders collectively known as the Katyn massacre.)
Particularly grim are the chapters which recount how the (male) victims are led to believe they are being repatriated, are prepared a feast, then led away afterwards to their horror and dismay to the killing fields at Katyn. The methodical and inhuman way of dispatch is almost sickening but the real shock comes when the bodies are discovered by the Nazis after they invade the Soviet Union. Most are virtually fused together and partially mummified by being tightly packed at burial, many stacked in the burial pits like so much cordwood.
Shocking, but not surprising given Stalin's treatment of his own people, is the way Polish women and children are literally dumped in the steppes and in Siberia and expected to fend for themselves in the harsh, unforgiving climate.
The families of Paul's focus do eventually make it out after suffering the greatest hardships. The author has met these survivors, of course, and their narratives put some meat on the dry bones of history. Millions of other Polish deportees never made it home.
Allen Paul's book is a chilling indictment, not only of Stalin and his murderous NKVD, but also of US and British diplomacy which failed to take any steps to ameliorate the conditions of Poles who had been arbitrarily arrested and summarily deported. The weakness of Churchill and Roosevelt in the face of Communist demands began with the suppression of evidence of Soviet culpability for Katyn and their failure to support postwar Polish territorial integrity at the Teheran and Yalta conferences. It then continued with tacit support for the postwar dispensation in Poland in which hundreds of thousands more were murdered by Stalin's henchmen, leading ultimately to the Iron Curtain and forty-five years of the Cold War.
You can tell by the tiny number of in-print books on this subject how little historical relevance the Katyn murders are given. I invite you to read this book. It may give you a whole new perspective on WWII and the moral dangers of alliance with the devil.
 moving, emotional, striking images March 30, 2000
Clifford F Anderson (USA)
18 out of 22 found this review helpful
I must admit that I skipped some of the chapters about the politics of war so I could focus on the stories of the families. These are the untold stories of WW2: a little Polish girl running up and down the railway station searching for her father; a family sent to a labor camp, doing the most humiliating arduous work. These families suffer, but there are stories of hope and love written in, keeping you interested. The pictures put some faces with the stories too.
A Solid, Detailed History of Events Surrounding the Katyn Massacre April 16, 2007
Jan Peczkis (Chicago IL, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Very seldom do we encounter a book such as this--where a non-Pole has such a thorough and relatively factual understanding of Polish history. Allen Paul not only discusses the genocidal Katyn massacre itself in considerable detail, but also gives a thorough review of Polish history in WWII and the immediate aftermath.
German-Soviet collaboration and mutual military assistance had long predated Hitler's coming to power in 1933 (p. 57). Paul is perceptive in his repudiation of oft-repeated canards regarding Polish conduct during the German-Soviet attack in 1939. He realizes that the Polish Air Force was not destroyed on the ground in the first days of the war (p. 23). (Functional Polish airplanes had earlier been scattered throughout secret airfields for this very contingency). He knows that Polish cavalry did not charge German tanks (p. 30). It was simply a canard from German propaganda that became "true" through retelling.
Paul provides graphic detail on the massacre itself. It was not just a cold-blooded shooting of captive enemy officers, but a systematic destruction of the very cream of Polish society. (Being part of a nation-destroying program, it was clearly a genocidal act). Some Poles valiantly resisted getting shot point blank, as indicated by the tied-up corpses (p. 353). Forensic evidence alone put the blame for this crime squarely on the Soviets (p. 229). There is riveting testimony provided by Stanislaw Swianiewicz, one of the few surviving eyewitnesses (pp. 103-on).
Paul provides a good description of the "airplane accident" that claimed the life of Wladyslaw Sikorski on July 4, 1943: "Coming when it did, only weeks after the discoveries at Katyn, Sikorski's death seemed too convenient. Evidence of sabotage was not found, but conclusive proof of an accident was not found either. Continuing doubts persisted. On November 12, 1952, Sumner Welles, who was U. S. under secretary of state at the time of the crash, told a House committee investigating the Katyn murders, `I have always believed that there was sabotage.' Welles noted that Sikorski had narrowly escaped death in a similar incident the year before in Montreal. `To put it mildly, it would be an odd coincidence,' Welles concluded." (pp. 239-240).
Paul discusses many of the heart-wrenching difficulties faced by the remaining Poles, released from Soviet captivity as part of the Sikorski-Maisky pact. (My mother, aunt, grandmother, and biological father were among them).
Unfortunately, there is an undercurrent of blame-the-circumstances thinking behind Paul's depiction of the sellout of Poland by Churchill and Roosevelt in the events leading up to and including Teheran and Yalta. Yes, the Soviet Union had done the largest share of the fighting. But the Soviet Union was also heavily dependent upon western Lend-Lease aid, which could have been judiciously dispensed to force Stalin to recognize Poland's territorial integrity and sovereignty. Yes, the west feared the possibility of a Soviet-Nazi separate peace. But Stalin was saddled with an identical fear of a western-Nazi separate peace.
Paul also implies that the Polish government-in-exile should have been more flexible, and more willing to compromise with Stalin. But what evidence is there that Poland's postwar fate would have been any different had it in fact been more "realistic"? With Hitler in 1939, the real issue had not been Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but the existence of Polish sovereignty. Likewise, with Stalin in 1941-onwards, the real issue had not been the location of the Soviet-Polish border but the existence of Polish sovereignty.
Paul has a mistaken understanding of Poland's prewar eastern half (the Kresy) (p. 248). He says that, in principle, the Soviet Union had just as much right to the territory as Poland because it "had been neither Polish nor Russian". That is utter nonsense. The Kresy had been part of Poland for centuries before the Partitions, and some parts of them (eastern Galicia) had never once been part of Russia until the Soviet-German conquest of Poland in 1939. The prewar Kresy had a 20-40% ethnic Polish minority (depending upon whose figures one believes). The percentage of Russians, outside of western Byelorussia (if one counts Byelorussians as Russians), was negligible. Nor is it correct that the non-Poles of the Kresy had "chafed under Polish rule." This was true only of some of them. In any case, few of them willingly preferred to be part of the Soviet Union. Ironically, Paul demolishes his own argument when he cites Sikorski, who, in retort to Maisky's assertion about Poland needing to be strictly limited to so-called ethnographic frontiers, pointed out that the Soviet Union was itself a multiethnic, multinational federation! (p. 158).
At the time this book was written, the Soviet Union had finally acknowledged blame for the Katyn Massacre. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national-security advisor to then President Carter, said in December 1990: "Recently, several direct participants in the mass murder of the defenseless Polish officers in Katyn and elsewhere--15,000 of them [now known to be 22,000] shot one by one in the back of the head--have been identified. If Gorbachev has totally broken with Stalinism, why has not a single one of them been put on trial? The Eichmann of the operation, a former NKVD major by the name of Serepenko who was in charge of the `logistics' of the operation, lives comfortably in Moscow." (p. 340).
Numerous Nazis have been found and punished for their crimes, but not a single Soviet Communist has been punished for his crimes. THAT is perhaps the greatest, and cruelest, legacy of the Katyn massacre.
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