“Katyn” has been exhibited at the Library of Congress and the European Union headquarters in Brussels.
Marie T. Jablonski, a member of the board of directors of the Polish Center of Discovery and Learning in Chicopee, looks at panels of the exhibit 'Katyn,' which will be on display at the center until April 21. CHICOPEE – Dr. Julian Gruner was a physician in Kalisz, Poland, and a three-time national champion in the high jump and javelin throw. A picture shows him with a handkerchief in his breast pocket and an arm around his wife. Their little girl shyly turns her back to the camera.
Gruner was murdered in 1940 at age 42 in a Soviet death camp.
He was one of six million Poles who died in a hidden holocaust of World War II whose details are still emerging.
The story is told in a traveling exhibition called “Katyn,” at the Polish Center of Discovery and Learning in Chicopee through April 21.
Gruner died in Charkov, but the atrocities of the period are now known collectively by the name Katyn, a village where many other Poles were executed by Soviet invaders.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the massacre at Katyn, but he denied his guilt to the last, and world politics abetted him in his lie. Only in modern times have documents exposed his role.
“It’s a story seldom written about,” said Stanislaw Radosz, executive director of the Polish Center. “Not in the media, and certainly not in textbooks.”
One of the first things Stalin did when he invaded Poland, said Radosz, was to round up the Polish officer corps and men of distinction who had been lawyers, teachers, priests and, like Gruner, doctors – the cream of Polish society. He executed them, then sent their families to internment camps, “marked for extermination.”
Printed on 44 seven-foot-tall panels, “Katyn” tells its shocking story through text and period photographs.
Elms held Polish history exhibit: wwlp.com
The reams of print can be overwhelming, but some of the grainy pictures are amazing historical documents – the Rev. Peter Sosnowski facing a firing squad without a blindfold, families bundled against the cold in a Siberian camp, a letter to “my dear husband” discovered in a mass grave.
The show is not recommended for children under 12.
The Nazis shared in the savagery. Tadeusz Kuroz was 13 when they demanded that his father give up one of the eight children in his family. Tadeusz was chosen.
His slave labor for the Nazis included the collection of dead bodies after bombing raids.
Later, Kuroz managed to emigrate to America. He is buried in the cemetery of St. Stanislaus Church in Chicopee with the ashes of his pet dog.
“These are your neighbors,” said Radosz. “Americans have never learned much about their Polish-American neighbors.”
“Katyn” has been exhibited at the Library of Congress and the European Union headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.
It was produced by the Polish Council for the Protection of Memory, the Kosciuszko Foundation and the Polish Embassy.