Government leaders attended remembrance ceremonies at sites including Warsaw’s Field Cathedral of the Polish Army and the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East.
State events included the burial of remains of victims of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which nearly 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were executed on orders from top Soviet authorities.
Fifteen skulls and other bone fragments, placed in 16 urns, were laid to rest at the cathedral after a funeral Mass attended by President Karol Nawrocki, senior officials, church leaders and families of victims.
Photo: PAP/Leszek Szymański
The state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) said the funeral was possible after forensic studies on the remains were completed.
Earlier in the day, Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz laid a wreath at the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk visited Wytyczno in eastern Poland to honour Border Protection Corps soldiers who fought one of the last battles against invading Soviet troops on October 1, 1939.
Officials described September 17, 1939, when Soviet forces crossed into Poland from the east following Nazi Germany’s attack from the west, as one of the most tragic dates in the nation’s modern history.
The invasion was carried out under the secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a Nazi-Soviet agreement to divide Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe.
After the invasion, about 250,000 Polish soldiers were taken prisoner by the Soviets, with thousands later executed.
Mass deportations of civilians followed, with up to 1.5 million Poles sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan, according to some estimates.
For decades, Soviet authorities denied responsibility for the Katyn Massacre, blaming Nazi Germany. Only in 1990, shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse, did Moscow admit the crime, calling it “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism.”
Last month, Poles also remembered tens of thousands of compatriots killed in the USSR before the 1939 invasion at ceremonies in Warsaw.
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Source: IAR, PAP