Speaking at a ceremony at the Katyn Museum in Warsaw on Monday, Nawrocki said the killing of some 22,000 Poles, who had faithfully served the Polish state, was designed to sever the chain of generations and eliminate the country's intellectual elite.
"Katyn is a powerful voice of silenced choirs, of those who could not speak," the president said, quoting the late Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert.
Nawrocki also called Katyn a symbol of Soviet lies and propaganda, saying the denial of that responsibility became a cornerstone of communist Poland after 1945.
He referenced the late priest Zdzisław Peszkowski, a Katyn survivor, who argued the massacre must be fully explained because it was built on a "terrible lie".
The president went further, arguing that Western Europe's postwar freedom and prosperity came at a cost borne by countries like Poland, Lithuania and Estonia, which he said were forced to live under communist oppression, where workers and resistance fighters were killed in the streets and in the jails of the secret police.
Relatives of the victims of the massacre attended the ceremony in Warsaw.
National memorial day
On Monday, a host of events are scheduled to take place in Poland to commemorate the victims of the 1940 Katyn Massacre.
April 13 is a national day of remembrance for the victims of the Soviet crime.
Almost 22,000 Polish prisoners of war were killed in the spring of 1940 on orders from top Soviet authorities, according to historians.
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, thousands of Polish officers were deported to camps in the Soviet Union.
POWs from camps in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov as well as Poles held in prisons run by the Soviet Union's NKVD secret police were among those murdered in April 1940.
Moscow for decades denied responsibility for the Katyn Massacre, while the topic was taboo when Poland after the war remained under Soviet control until 1989.
(ał)
Source: tvp.info, IAR