Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

Former Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk has just been
extradited from the U.S. to Germany to stand trial as accessory to 29,000
deaths in the Holocaust. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic awaits
trial in The Hague for his part in the mass murder of 8,000 Bosnian
Muslims at Srebrenica. But no one has ever stood in the dock for their
part in the Katyn massacre.
The new film is the work of the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda,
whose father, Jakub, was one of the murdered officers. As well as telling
the story of their deaths, Katyn dramatises the aftermath of the war when,
in communist Poland, it was forbidden to mention the dead officers.
For those who did, prison awaited. As a result, ignorance of the crime
spread throughout Poland over 40 years. For decades, it fell to emigre
Poles to keep the name of Katyn alive.
Among them are British Poles for whom Katyn remains a wound which
refuses to heal. It’s not just that their fathers were murdered - the officers’
families also felt the blunt instrument of Soviet oppression. As part of
Stalin’s larger plan to weaken Polish opposition to Communism, 1.6
million Poles were deported to far-flung corners of the Soviet Union.
One of those British Poles is Andrzej Polniaszek. Now 81, he was 12 in
1939 when his father Franciszek, a doctor of law and an officer, was
captured when the Soviets moved into Poland.
Soviet documentation has revealed that his father was taken to the camp in
Starobelsk, where, over a long, bitterly cold winter, he would have been
subjected to intense political agitation.
By March 5, when Stalin signed his execution order, he had been
condemned to death as one of 22,000 ‘hardened and uncompromising
enemies of Soviet authority’.
By April 13, Andrzej’s father may well have been already dead. It was on
that date that the young Andrzej, with his mother and sister, heard a knock
on their apartment door.
‘At three in the morning the soldiers came. We had an hour to pack only
the things we could carry. They even warned: ‘Take warm clothes. You’ll
be there for some time.’‘
Meanwhile, in the Polish countryside, Waclaw and Janusz Gasiorowski,
aged ten and seven, were rounded up with their mother and sister.
Their father Tadeusz, a lieutenant in the Pomeranian infantry, had been
taken prisoner the previous September, and they feared the worst.
‘There had been regular letters from our father,’ recalls Janusz. ‘And then
it abruptly stopped. Not only our correspondence, but that of everyone
who had someone in those camps.’
Andrzej Polniaszek ended up in Kazakhstan - ‘a godforsaken part of the
country with a Siberian climate’. When Waclaw and Janusz got off an
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