Katyń Massacre Exhibit at the Buffalo and Erie County Central Library from Wednesday, September 29 at 8:30am through October 18 at 6:00pm. The library is located at 1 Lafayette Square, Buffalo, New York.

Information on the 70th anniversary of the Katyń Forest massacre will be highlighted with an exhibit at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library. There are numerous local connections to the massacre. The exhibit lists two Buffalo-born men who were killed in the massacre. A number of current local residents are descendants of others who were among the 20,000+ murdered and buried in Katyń by the Soviet secret police.

The exhibit was featured earlier this year at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC during the month of April coinciding with the tragic plane crash that killed nearly 100 of Poland’s leadership personnel in Smolensk, Russia. The Buffalo News did a video on Katyń and the exhibit.

The tragedy thrust the story of Katyń onto the front pages of newspapers around the world, spurring interest in this massacre that had been covered up for decades by the Soviets.

The exhibit was prepared by Andrzej Przewoźnik, a Polish historian, for the Council to Preserve the Memory of Combat and Martyrdom and the New York City based Kościuszko Foundation. Ironically Przewoźnik was one of those killed in that plane crash on April 10.

A CIA spokesman, Benjamin Fischer wrote the following about Katyn:

“One of the earliest – and certainly the most famous – mass shootings of prisoners of war during World War II did not occur in the heat of battle but was a cold-blooded act of political murder. The victims were Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Strictly speaking, even the Polish servicemen were not POWs.

The USSR had not declared war, and the Polish commander in chief had ordered his troops not to engage Soviet forces. But there was little the Poles could do. On 28 September, the USSR and Nazi Germany, allied since August, partitioned and then dissolved the Polish state. They then began implementing parallel policies of suppressing all resistance and destroying the Polish elite in their respective areas.”

This exhibit is being brought to Buffalo through the efforts of the WNY Division of the Polish American Congress and the Kościuszko Foundation, WNY Chapter and the Polish Legacy Project of Buffalo-WWII.

On Sunday, October 17th at 2pm Andrzej Wajda’s Oscar nominated film “Katyń” will be screened in the library. The film contains English subtitles.

The exhibit is located in the open area on the main floor of the library.