Poland Grieves

CNN - Why Poland's Grief is Doubled

11 Apr 2010 By Alex Stororzynski The tragic death of President Lech Kaczynski and Poland's political and military elite among the trees of the Katyn Forest is surreal, given that in those same woods, thousands of Polish prisoners of war were murdered by Joseph Stalin's secret police.

Newsweek - What's Next for Poland

President Kaczynski's visit to Russia was supposed to help heal a historic rift between the two countries. But as NEWSWEEK's former Warsaw bureau chief Andrew Nagorski explains, that won't be easy. Especially now.

Edmonton Sun - Poland Weeps

10 Apr 2010 By Patrycja Romanowska On April 10, the courtyard of the presidential palace in Warsaw was aglow as grief stricken people lit candles encased in coloured glass and prayed for the souls of those who had once lived there. In Krakow, church bells tolled heavily and even the sky wept, sending down thick sheets of rain to drench the hundreds of people gathering to mourn at the Wawel Cathedral. The evening mass began with Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz somberly listing the names of the 93 people who had died in a plane crash in Smolensk, Russia only hours before.

BBC News - Looking beyond Poland's 'unprecedented disaster'

10 Apr 2010 ... Krzysztof Bobinski consider the immediate and longer-term effects of the 70th anniversary of the massacre in a wood outside Smolensk. ...

Remembering the Katyn Forest Massacre

7 Apr 2010 By Wanda Urbanska After weeks of delay, the Russians issued my friend Allen Paul a visa yesterday. He had been invited by Prime Minister Donald Tusk to be a part of the Polish delegation to the ceremony at Katyn, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet massacre of more than 20,000 of Poland’s military officers and reservists, its best and brightest, in 1940.

Washington Post: Meeting of Russian, Polish leaders could shed light on 1940 massacre

7 Apr 2010 By Justine Jablonska A historic meeting scheduled for Wednesday between top leaders of Russia and Poland is expected to provide new details about Russia's mass execution of 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1940 and may open the way toward improved relations between the two countries.

The mass slaying of the Polish prisoners of war by the Soviet secret police is one of the darker and less known chapters of World War II, said Kyle Parker, a Russian expert and policy adviser to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an independent U.S. agency that helps formulate American policy for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.