A monument commemorating the victims of the Katyn Massacre was officially unveiled at the Church of Blessed Czesław in Opole. As Urszula Gawor from the Katyn Families Association in Opole said, this is the first place of commemoration of this crime in the capital of the region.
The site of commemorating the murder, the victims of which were more than 20,000 officers and representatives of the Polish intelligentsia captured by the Soviet army after the September campaign in 1939, consists of several plaques with the names of the places where Poles were executed on command of Joseph Stalin, and an image of God’s Mother of Katyn.
Due to the pandemic, the course of the ceremony was very modest. In front of the memorial site, the 10th Logistics Brigade from Opole put up an honor guard.
Magdalena Kalicka, representing the voivode of Opole, recalled that for decades the state that was responsible for the crime denied its existence. It was only in 1990 that the Soviet Union officially confirmed the truthfulness of the accusations formulated by Polish historians in the 1940s that the authorities of the USSR had committed this crime.