ABC Foreign Correspondent - The Curse of Katyn - mvgroup

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The Curse of Katyn

Broadcast: 31/08/2010

Reporter: Trevor Bormann


It took more than half a century to get the shocking truth.

Generations of Poles had long laboured under the official misconception that the Nazis were responsible for the systematic annihilation of thousands of their finest citizens - professionals, academics, police officers and public servants in the Katyn forest.

But late last century, as the communist yoke finally gave way and the fog of lies began to lift, history would reveal that it was not their one-time German occupiers who systematically despatched the shivering assembled, one by one with a pistol shot to the back of the head and threw them into mass graves.

It was the oppressor who came next. Josef Stalin.

Russia’s military put cold and callous effect to the strongman’s instructions: wipe out Poland’s elite.

This monumental crime in the forest had indelibly stained Poland’s relationship with Germany. Now though, the nation shifted its disdain toward Russia and the loathing ran deep.

Even as President Lech Kaczynski boarded a jet bound for the 70th commemoration of the Katyn massacre the relationship between Warsaw and Moscow was cool at best. Along for the 90 minute flight to Smolensk were Poland’s military, political and public service leadership.

When the President’s Russian-made Tupulov Tu-154 jet - blinded by fog – clipped trees and exploded into a fireball just 200 metres shy of the Smolensk strip it took no time at all for old suspicions to fan devious theories.

Reporter Trevor Bormann has just returned from the site of this extraordinary confluence of tragedies with a powerful and moving story about how Poland is trying to deal with these two deep scars on its psyche.

“It’s an awful, awful place and on the other hand it is so beautiful and it’s kind of impossible that human beings could do this to human beings.” GABRIELA BUCZEK

Through the eyes of a young Polish woman who’s embarked on a journey to explore her own family’s connection with the WW2 massacre we examine a nation’s strange, inexorable bond with Katyn and its efforts to reconcile itself to a bizarre repetition of epic loss.