This page is dedicated to the memory of the Polish intelligentsia—primarily POWs, teachers, priests, lawyers, artists, and other professionals—arrested by the NKVD in 1939 and brutally murdered in the Katyn Forest in 1940 under direct orders from Stalin. On September 1, 1939, N**i Germany invaded Poland from the west, an event which sparked the outbreak of the war. A couple of weeks later, the Sov
iet Union, at that time allied with the N**is, invaded from the east. Sandwiched by this Soviet-N**i alliance, Poland fought valiantly before falling to the two invaders. The Soviet rulers terrorized Poland, sending 1.5 million citizens to Siberia, capturing 250,000 military personnel and sending over 20,000 border-guard officers to three Soviet prison camps. These 20,000 (most of them reservists) were composed of priests, professors, judges, civil servants and others. In the words inscribed on the Katyn monument’s new plaque, “They were Poland’s leaders and thinkers, the flower of Polish intelligentsia…to hardened Communists they were class enemies and, therefore, enemies of the Soviet Union.”
