The Katyn Shadow March – commemorating about 22 thousand Polish citizens who were murdered by the NKVD in the spring of 1940, went down the streets of Warsaw on Sunday. One hundred fifty reenactors in the uniforms of the Polish Army, Border Protection Corps and State Police took part in the staging.
The Katyn March of Shadows, organized by the Institute of National Remembrance together with the Historical Group’ Radosław Grouping’, was held for the thirteenth time. The March is a tribute to the nearly 22 thousand Polish citizens murdered by the Soviets in 1940 in Katyn and other places of execution in the East.
“The March has brought back for years vivid memories of those who for many years could not be talked about. We chose the date of September 20, because it is part of the celebration of the anniversary of the Soviet aggression against Poland in 1939,” stressed the March coordinator Jarosław Wróblewski from the Historical Group’ Radosław Grouping’.
After the Soviet aggression against Poland on September 17, 1939, about 250 thousand Polish citizens were taken prisoner, including over 10 thousand officers who ended up in the network of camps created by the head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria. In the spring of 1940, NKVD functionaries – following the resolution of Joseph Stalin and his politburo of March 5, 1940 – shot and killed nearly 22 000 Polish citizens held in camps and prisons in the Soviet Union.