POLISH INTELLIGENTSIA IN KATYŃ... this is not a private mourning, it is a national disaster - Maria Czapska

The legacy of historiography concerning Polish prisoners of war in the East after 17 September 1939 is quite impressive. However, not all of the issues are reflected in the literature. The challenge of seeing the human aspect and presenting it in multiple dimensions - for example, as a human and national experience, as an attempt to reflect on who the victims were and who was missed in post-war Poland - remains open.

By the end of 1939, three months of captivity had passed for the soldiers of September who found themselves in NKVD camps. It was then that important decisions about their future were taken. For the privates, it meant a return to their hometowns or forced labour, and for a select group of officers, generals, senior officials and police officers, an imminent death sentence. On 3 October 1939, three special NKVD camps were established in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov. As of 29 December, of the total of around 15,000 officers held in these camps, more than half were reservists. They were teachers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, priests, journalists, writers, poets, social activists, politicians, professors and assistant professors of universities, world-famous scientists - representatives of the Polish intelligentsia summoned to defend their homeland.

The generally applicable legal regulations on the detention of prisoners of war stipulated that they should be treated humanely, protected from violence and insult. However, the USSR government did not respect the international agreements concluded in the Tsar era, which included the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. It did not adhere to the Geneva Convention of 27 July 1929, setting out the rules for the treatment of prisoners of war, either. Instead, it was guided by class-based penal legislation designed to protect the socialist state of workers and peasants.

The very first directives and orders issued from 14 September 1939 defined the attitude of the aggressors towards the Polish soldiers. Although there was no formal declaration of war, they formulated a military and political objective of operations against Poland. Besides reaching the line of demarcation between the spheres of German and Soviet influence established in the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, a decision was made to annihilate the spiritual leaders of the Polish nation and to undertake an almost complete replacement of the intelligentsia elite. This assumption is proven by the stay of the September soldiers in Soviet captivity - a period that can be divided in two stages. The first one, when the captives remained under the control of the Red Army, can be called transitional. The second one, when they were handed over to the NKVD, lasted from early October 1939 to August 1941 (or longer, for some of them). The takeover of prisoners of war by the political police of the Soviet Union was a violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, since, according to their provisions, the life and health of military personnel of the enemy army were the responsibility of the government and command of the armed forces of the country in the captivity of which they were taken.

The NKVD treated the Polish soldiers incarcerated in the special camps as counter-revolutionaries. According to a decision taken by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (b) on 5 March 1940, the problem of Polish prisoners of war, former Polish officers, landowners, factory owners, clerics, public officials and fugitives had to be considered under a special procedure, applying the maximum penalty - shooting. The detainees, being the leadership, intellectual elite and, at the same time, anti-Soviet factor, could, in case of liberation, become active against the Soviet power, posing a threat in case of an armed conflict with Germany. This motivation for the massacre was indicated by a note from Lavrentiy Beria attached to the March decision. Joseph Stalin's decision to exterminate the captives was also influenced by the still vivid memory of the Polish-Soviet war of 1919 - 1920. It is not without reason that the prisoners were asked about their participation in that war in the questionnaire they filled out upon arrival at the camps. The murder of the Polish officers must therefore be considered both as retaliation for the defeat of the Red Army and as a deliberate preventive measure.

NO BATHS, TOILETS OR SICK ROOMS

The local authorities instructed to set up prisoner of war camps were usually not informed in advance of Moscow's plans. Due to the lack of time and funds, they did not set aside adequate food supplies for the number of prisoners of war, mobilise sufficient administrative and sanitary-medical staff, or carry out the necessary renovations to the facilities for the prisoners of war, nor did they set up kitchens, baths or sanitary facilities. The hastily prepared camps were overcrowded and dirty, stuffy and damp. The prisoners were given meals of low nutritional value: a portion of wheat and rye bread, warm thin soup (fish, lung, lentil, vetch, cabbage or barley soup), groats or salted fish. It was hard to get water to drink, let alone wash and use the toilet. No care was taken to arrange sick rooms, outpatient clinics or isolation rooms, either. The captives, weakened by many days of captivity in primitive sanitary and hygienic conditions, were particularly afflicted by lice, diarrhoea, colds, influenza, tuberculosis, skin diseases and infectious diseases: dysentery, diphtheria and typhoid fever.

It was only due to the fact that there were doctors among the detainees that small camp 'hospitals' could be set up. In the Kozelsk camp, the prisoners formed a group of nurses and a cadre of doctors themselves. However, the lack of even basic medicines and medical equipment severely limited their options and forced them to use so-called folk medicine. The famous Warsaw surgeon Dr. Henryk Levittoux, Dr. Jan Gruner and Dr. Jan Boroń, head of the internal medicine department of the Przemyśl hospital, were active in Starobelsk.

Using the example of Colonel Boron, whose legacy has found its way to the Katyń Museum, we can reconstruct the educational and career paths of many representatives of the pre-war intelligentsia, learn what views shaped their minds and conduct, and finally conclude what values led them to the Soviet death pits.

A DOCTOR WHO DID NOT GIVE UP HIS HONOUR

Jan Boroń lost his parents at an early age. His older sister provided care for him over the years. After graduating from primary school, he sold the part of his father's property he owned and used the proceeds for further education. He passed his high school final examinations in Rzeszów and then graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Lviv. During the First World War, he was recruited into the Austrian army and served on the Italian front. After a health breakdown and treatment, he ended up in the East. It was there that he had his first encounter with the 'Muscovites' at the front. His letters from the front to his wife Zofia, née Bielawska, bear witness to the horrors of war, which were also experienced by the civilian population. After Poland regained its independence, he volunteered to join the Polish Army. He provided care to the wounded and sick during the Polish-Bolshevik war.

Learning about the dangerous enemy contributed to the subsequent search for a safe settlement for his family. Although he could have applied for a lucrative practice in, for example, Kostopol in Volhynia, Boroń felt that this was too close to the border (50 km) and, in case of a sudden armed conflict, it would be difficult to evacuate from there with their belongings. He chose Przemyśl, where he found a job at the hospital as head of the internal medicine department and acquired an apartment with the savings he had accumulated over the years. From this town he was recruited to the army in 1939.

Surprised by the invasion of the Red Army on 17 September, like many other Polish soldiers, and unable to carry out Marshal Rydz-Smigly's order to retreat to Hungary or Romania, Colonel Boroń was taken prisoner by the Soviets. He experienced the anguish that was common to all the prisoners of war. During a journey covered on foot under armed escort and without any rations, he witnessed hungry soldiers digging up potatoes and beetroot in the fields at rest stops and drinking water from ditches, which caused stomach problems.

He was taken to the point of transfer to the NKVD relatively soon. This was where the detainees were first selected in an attempt to establish their identity and military rank. Some officers, aware of the danger, got rid of their distinctions and hid their true charges and functions. Boron, however, retained the paddles, saying: I am not giving up my honour. He was transported to the special camp in Starobelsk along with the other officers. The journey was a continuation of all the humiliations: the prisoners were travelling dirty, unshaven and cold. If they were fed, it was irregular: rye bread, fish preserves, thin soup - something you would rather drink than eat.

Upon arrival, he saw a filthy camp, hastily organised in an old Orthodox monastery. There was only one artesian well in operation in its area. There were no baths, laundry facilities, toilets, waste pits, etc. A large group of mobilised 'doctors' were ordered by the NKVD to clean the camp, build latrines and other sanitary facilities. Although there were no medicines available, the doctors also tried to help the sick and administered vaccinations against typhoid and smallpox recommended by the camp authorities.

Doctors and pharmacists from Starobelsk, protected by the international Geneva Convention, sent a letter to Marshal Kliment Voroshilov on 30 October 1939 regarding their unlawful detention in captivity. They pointed out that the Soviet troops found them performing medical duties in field hospitals or in military units, and asked to be sent back to their places of permanent residence or to one of the neutral countries (such as the USA or Sweden). The reply arrived a month later, addressed, however, not to the prisoners of war, but to the commandant of the Soviet camp, Capt. Berezhkov. It ordered that the directives of the NKVD Board for Prisoners of War, rather than the principles of the Geneva Convention, should be applied to medical prisoners. That sealed their fate, which ended with their execution in Kharkov.

SENTENCE ON THE POLISH ELITE

As we view the Katyń massacre in its broadest sense, as the elimination of the Polish intelligentsia, we should see its much broader dimension and associate it with the mass deportations of Poles deep into the USSR - including the families of the murdered officers and state officials.

On 7 March 1940, the head of the NKVD Main Board for Prisoners of War, Major Petr Soprunienko, received an order from People's Commissar of the Internal Affairs, Beria, to compile lists of the families of prisoners of war. These had to include the whereabouts of not only their wives and children, but also their parents, brothers and sisters. To this end, Beria's deputy Vasily Chernyshov delegated high rank NKVD officers to the camps. The lists they drew up then became the grounds for the mass deportation of family members of the prisoners held in NKVD special camps, carried out at the beginning of April.

The issue of coordination of the repression of Polish intelligentsia under Soviet and German occupation remains open. Indeed, similar proscription lists were compiled in German prisoner of war camps. The exchange of lists marked the realisation of one of the secret protocols signed on 28 September 1939 - alongside the Soviet-German Treaty of Border and Friendship - that both sides would not tolerate any Polish agitation in their territories that would affect the other's territories. It was in particular the intelligentsia that represented the part of the nation most suspected of "Polish agitation", which was the most difficult to win over and induce to collaborate.

The group that Florian Znaniecki called the layer of spiritual leaders was eradicated through the actions of both invaders. The space 'vacated' by the victims had to be quickly filled with completely different people and content. It was commonly demonstrated that everything the Polish elite was involved in up to 1939 should be stigmatised and removed from public perception. The Polish intellectual was portrayed as a weak and despicable type, anachronistically obsessed with the 'dustbin of history'.

The nation's recent history - a history with implanted amnesia - has also been remodelled. Only German crimes were shown and investigated, thus only half of the historical memory remained in public view. In post-war education until 1989, neither Katyń nor the problem of Soviet occupation, involving the extermination of Polish citizens and the destruction of Polish culture, were present.

The families of the thousands of victims of the Katyń crime in the new communist Poland were afraid. The elders did not tell the children who had killed their fathers to avoid repression. The new Poland, wishing to forget the victims of Katyń, was at the same time erasing the Poles who were the descendants of the participants in the uprisings, the bearers of patriotic values, from the national memory. Lt. Bogdan Różycki, commander of the staff squadron of the Suwałki Cavalry Brigade, who was murdered in Kharkov, was a descendant of Col. Karol Różycki, who commanded the Volhynia Regiment during the November Uprising. Colonel Karol Hauke-Bosak, chief of staff of the "Vladimir" Group, was a great-grandson of one of the leading commanders of the January Uprising, Józef Hauke-Bosak. The death pits should therefore be viewed not only as the demise of representatives of the Polish intelligentsia, but also as the end of the genealogy of families who were important to the Polish history.

Using the proper filters of social promotion, the new Poland promoted obedient people, who were deprived of tradition and injected with a new system of thinking. The intelligentsia was degraded. Efforts were made to eradicate a sense of responsibility to society, a sense of obligation, a sense of coherence with one's own historical community, all of which marked it through the 19th century until 1939. Socialist education stood guard to keep people alienated.

At present, one can only ask a question that everyone must answer for themselves: what values did the victims of Katyń bring to our national consciousness, is the motto "God, Honour, Homeland", which determines specific behaviours, still valid? Lastly, what have we done with the message of the murdered? Do we perceive them as patriots who served Poland with dignity to the end, or as naive soldiers who allowed themselves to be slaughtered, "like sheep walking to the slaughter"?