Publication

On the morning of April 10th, the President of Poland Lech Kaczyński and 95 others, including senior government officials, political leaders and Polish patriots, were killed in a tragic plane crash near Smolensk, Russia. They were travelling to attend a commemorative ceremony in the Katyń Forest, where the Soviet secret police NKVD had slaughtered over 20,000 Polish military officers in 1940. The Soviet Union continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings as well as the subsequent cover-up. The remembrance of the truth about the Katyń murders was particularly important to President Kaczyński. It will become a part of his legacy now that the whole world will learn of the massacre and those responsible for it, ironically, as a result of his death.