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Exhibition about Katyn massacre opened in Minsk

An exhibition titled, “I Remember. Katyn 1940,” was opened at the Belarusian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War on June 24, BelaPAN reports.

Organized by the National Culture Center in Warsaw and the Polish Institute in Minsk, the exhibition features copies of documents and photographs about the Katyn massacre in which some 20,000 Polish nationals, including about 8,000 Polish army officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, were executed by the NKVD in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in 1940.

The exhibition was expected to have been opened earlier, but it was postponed because of the April plane crash near Smolensk that took the lives of President Lech Kachynski, his wife and 94 other Polish citizens, who were traveling to attend a commemorative ceremony at the Katyn memorial, Piotr Kozakiewicz, director of the Polish Institute, said at the opening ceremony.

Belarusian Culture Minister Pavel Latushka said that after watching Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn, he was so shocked that he had to take a walk in the fresh air for a while. “I’ve never been to Katyn, but I can understand this pain,” the minister said.

The opening of the exhibition is a good sign for the history of the two countries because the mention of the Katyn tragedy was taboo in Soviet-era Russia and Belarus, said Wieslaw Romanowski, deputy director of the Polish Institute.

“We want to show that what happened in Katyn is not only the pain of the Poles, it is part of the Soviet crimes,” Mr. Romanowski said. “It will be very good if we tell the truth about this.”