Arts & Entertainment

Woman Reveals Ties to Polish Katyn Massacre

Niles resident tells of emotional link after movie about Soviet war crime covered up for 50 years.

When the lights flipped on after a screening of the movie Katyn, Alice Obermann had tears in her eyes.

The final scenes of the movie, directed by the renowned Polish director Andrzej Wajda, showed how Soviet troops pumped bullets into Polish military officers, professors and other educated leaders before their bodies were shoved into mass graves in Russia's Katyn forest in the spring of 1940.

Katyn echoed from history in April when Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski, and many of its top military and civilian leaders were killed in a plane crash in Russia on their way to honor the 70th anniversary of the World War II massacre.  Niles also has a monument to the Katyn dead in St. Adalbert's Cemetery.

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The Niles Public Library screened Katyn on Oct. 16, and Ireneusz Raciborski, a professor of Polish history, spoke afterward to provide background about the events shown.

It wasn't until the end of Raciborski's question-and-answer period that Niles resident Obermann raised her hand and said, "This was very personal for me because my father was killed at Katyn when I was one year old."

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One scene in the movie portrayed an experience similar to what Obermann's mother, Maria Sym, went through. Soviet soldiers came to an apartment building, knocked on a door and verified that the occupant was the wife of a Polish officer. They told her she had to pack her things and gather up her young daughter and come with them. Obermann said the scene hit her emotionally.

The movie doesn't show what happened to the mother and daughter after they were taken away in a Soviet truck, but  Obermann and her mother were sent to Siberia, where her mother was forced to work in a labor camp.

After the screening, Raciborski started his remarks with, "It really happened. Some people can't believe that human beings would do that to other human beings, but it really happened."

He explained the relationship between the Germans and the Russians, who were allies in attacking Poland in the fall of 1939, then became enemies when Germany's Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered Poland's educated and leadership classes killed at Katyn because he strategized the country could not mount an effective defense without them. At least 20,000 people were purged.

The Soviet Union tried to pin the crime on Nazi Germany, whose invasion of Poland started World War II. Raciborski said that for 45 years after the war, the Soviet Union, which controlled Poland as part of the Iron Curtain, forbid Poles to speak of Katyn and, particularly, not to infer that Russians were culpable for the crime.

"If you spoke of it, you could be dismissed from school, or your parents could lose their jobs," Raciborski said.

Not until 50 years later--in 1990--did Soviet leader Mikhail Gorvachev admit Russia perpetrated the Katyn massacre.

"Russia lied to us and the whole world for 50 years," Raciborski said. "So please remember politicians can look you in the eye and lie to you--for 50 long years."

Obermann said her mother could never return to Poland when it was under Soviet control for the very reason that her husband, Rudolf Volpel, had been a Polish military officer. Eventually, they fled Siberia with Polish forces and traveled through Iran and Iraq to Great Britain. They arrived in the U.S. when Obermann was 12 years old.

After Raciborski ended his talk, a small crowd gathered around Obermann to ask about her experience.

"I just lost my mom four years ago. She was quite a lady to get through all that by herself with me as a baby. I appreciate now what she went through," Obermann told them.

She had brought with her a bronze medal that her mother had received from the Katyn Society.  A small glass window embedded in it held some of the earth that was shoveled over the Polish victims' bodies.

After her mother passed on, Obermann found a letter her father had written. In it, he asked his wife, "Do you think our little one will remember me?"

That, she said, was an emotional day.

"It's always been a two-way thing [about Katyn]," she said. "On one hand, I didn't want to think about it. On the other hand, it has to be spoken of and told to the world."


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