The Katyn Order
Page 41
The horror of Katyn continues to this day. In April 2010, the president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, along with his wife and more than ninety other Polish dignitaries, died in an airplane crash in Russia. They were en route to a ceremony commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre. On 26 November 2010, the Russian parliament officially condemned Joseph Stalin by name for the mass execution of Poles at Katyn. The parliament declared that the Soviet dictator and other Soviet officials had ordered the “Katyn crime” in 1940.
In writing The Katyn Order, I chose to begin the story with another great tragedy of World War Two, the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Like the Katyn massacre, the facts of the Warsaw Rising were suppressed for decades after the war by the communist authorities governing Poland. Consequently, the story of the Rising is not well known in the West, and is often confused with the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943. They were, in fact, two completely different events.
By the summer of 1944, it was clear that Germany would be defeated by the Allies. American and British forces were liberating France, Belgium and the Netherlands, while Soviet forces were pushing into Poland. The German Army was in retreat. Having no illusions about what “liberation” by the Soviets would mean for their future, Poland’s home army, the AK, acting on instructions from their Government-in-Exile in London, attempted to seize the opportunity to take control of their capital. What ensued was the Warsaw Rising, a catastrophe of epic proportions, that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of lives, and the destruction of one of the world’s great cities. Winston Churchill, who agonized over the struggle for Poland’s capital as it unfolded day-after-tragic-day, described it this way in his memoirs:
The struggle in Warsaw had lasted more than sixty days. Of the 40,000 men and women of the Polish Underground Army, 15,000 fell . . . The suppression of the revolt cost the German Army 10,000 killed, 7,000 missing and 9,000 wounded. The proportions attest to the hand-to-hand nature of the fighting. When the Russians entered the city three months later, they found nothing but the shattered streets and the unburied dead. Such was their liberation of Poland, where they now rule. But this cannot be the end of the story.
For more information on the Warsaw Rising, consult the website, www.warsawuprising.com.
The Katyn Order is a work of fiction. The order signed by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Politburo is an historical fact. Whether a copy of the order ever existed, however, is a matter of the author’s speculation. The characters in this story are fictitious, but all of the events are true and the majority of places described are real, as far as my research could confirm. There are a few notable exceptions: the Copernicus Memorial Library in Krakow and the Tatra Mountain village of Prochowa are products of my imagination, as are the Church of the Sacred Mother, the Polonia Bank, and the Bomb Shelter Pub in Warsaw. I also elected to have the dining room of the Adlon Hotel survive the fire.
Ludwik Banach is also a fictitious character, as is his relationship with the real historical person Hans Frank. Banach’s journal is fictitious, but it incorporates many historical facts, including the arrest of more than two hundred Polish intellectuals by the Nazis, and the existence of the Sachsenhausen prison camp and the Academy of German Law.