After the Soviet Union's aggression against Poland on 17 September 1939, approximately 250 thousand soldiers of the Polish Army and Border Protection Corps, officers of the State Police, Silesian Voivodeship Police, Prison Guard, Border Guard and all other uniformed formations were taken prisoner. Prisons in the Eastern Borderlands, occupied by the USSR, soon also filled with thousands of civilians. From among the prisoners of war and civilian captives, the NKVD selected more than 20,000 people, who were placed in special NKVD camps in Kozelsk, Starobilsk and Ostashkov, as well as prisons in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. They were representatives of the military, political, intellectual and cultural elites of the Second Polish Republic.

Based on the political decision of the highest authorities of the USSR of 5 March 1940, in the following months, a mass crime was committed against the defenceless prisoners of war and civilian captives who, regardless of their religion, education, wealth and background, were, according to the Soviets, “hardened and incorrigible enemies of the Soviet state”. At the same time, a large-scale operation of deporting civilians deep into the USSR was carried out, including the families of the prisoners of war and civilian captives living in the territories annexed by Soviet Russia.

The German attack on the USSR in 1941 changed the balance of power in the international arena and forced the establishment of relations between the government of the Republic of Poland in exile and Soviet Russia. Polish authorities began searching for the “missing ones”. Their fate was unknown until April 1943, when, for propaganda reasons, the Germans officially informed the public about the discovery of mass graves in Katyn. The USSR immediately took action to falsify and cover up the Katyn crime, currently referred to as the Katyn lie. During the communist era, any attempt to investigate the Soviet perpetration and to commemorate the murdered was prohibited.

It was not until 13 April 1990 that the USSR officially admitted to committing the “Stalinist crime”. This enabled archaeological and exhumation research to be carried out in Kharkiv, Katyn, Mednoye and Bykivnia, where cemeteries of the victims of the Katyn massacre were subsequently established. Unfortunately, the search for the so-called Belarusian Katyn list, which may include about 4 thousand previously unknown names of victims of Soviet crimes committed against citizens of the Republic of Poland, is still ongoing.

Bartłomiej Bydoń, Ph.D

The reverse of the coin features symbolic silhouettes of victims – officers of the Polish Army and an officer of the State Police; in the background, there is a fragment of the Katyn Epitaph containing details of the victims of the Katyn massacre.

The obverse of the coin features a reproduction of the model 19 military eagle emblem with a broken wing found in the death pits in Kharkiv, as well as two shoulder marks: one belonging to an officer of the Polish Army and the other to an officer of the Silesian Voivodeship Police. Above there is a line from a postcard sent by the family to one of the prisoners.

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