Shortly after New Year’s in 1940, that good neighbor Joseph Stalin and his friends on the Politburo authorized the elimination of the Polish Army Corp. Before summer began, an estimated 22,000 Poles had been executed. It was a largely unknown incident until the Nazis rolled through on their way to Russia and discovered the mass graves. The Nazis were of course appalled, and pointed the finger directly at the communists, who in turn accused the Nazis of the atrocity. Douglas Jacobson uses the executions as an introduction to The Katyn Order (McBooks Press, $24.95), named after the Katyn Forest where an estimated 4,000 were murdered.
The novel opens during the Warsaw Rising, four years after the murders, when the “Armia Krajowa,” or “AK,” went to battle with the Germans as the Russians were pushing them back towards Berlin. The AK hoped to take control of Warsaw before the Russians arrived, but things didn’t go as well as planned, and their good neighbors pulled up on the opposite bank of the Vistula River and watched as the Germans annihilated the Polish fighters.
This article appears in May 12-18, 2011.
