The last time Irena Laniewski saw her father was on Sept. 12, 1939. She was 18. He was on a motorcycle, riding away from the family's home in Krzemieniec, a village near the Polish-Soviet border.
It was two weeks after Hitler's troops had marched into Poland, and the Polish army was retreating to Hungary to regroup. Her father, a captain who'd been at the front, had come home to say goodbye before leaving.Irena was not to learn until three and a half years later that her father had become a victim not of the Germans but of the Soviets. He was one of 5,000 Polish officers massacred and buried in mass graves in a tiny forest called Katyn between Smolensk and Minsk in western Russia.
The daughter is now 68 and living in Sandy. After the war she lived in England for nine years, then moved to New York, where she lived for 30 years. When her husband died, she moved in with her son and his family in Dallas, and, when he was transferred to Utah a year ago, she came too.
Laniewski said that even when word of the Katyn massacre surfaced in 1943, the story was largely overshadowed by the news of German war atrocities, and later it was downplayed by the U.S. government, which didn't want to criticize its wartime ally, the Soviet Union.
But Poles at home and abroad have not forgotten Katyn. Monuments have been erected in Poland, England, Canada and Australia, and funds are being collected for one in New York, said Laniewski.
And now the story of the massacre is getting new attention. Laniewski and her younger sister, Zofia, who still lives in Poland, were given a trip to the infamous forest and interviewed by ABC News' "20/20" program for a story that will air Friday night.
Two months after Laniewski's father, Witold Kozlowski, last visited home in 1939, his family got a letter from him. He was among a group of 5,000 fleeing Polish army officers who'd been captured by the Russians, then Germany's allies. The officers were being held in a camp in Kozelsk, southwest of Moscow.
Ten thousand more Polish officers had been taken to two other Soviet camps - Starobelsk, west of Stalingrad, and Ostashkov, northwest of Moscow.
In his letter, Kozlowski reassured his family that he was being treated well and said the officers hoped to be released soon; surely the Soviets couldn't keep them locked up. The letters came for four months. The last arrived at the end of March 1940.
"And then on April 13, the second large transports of Polish people, civilians, took place," Laniewski said.
One large group of Poles had already been deported to Russia on Feb. 14, and on April 13, someone banged on the Kozlowskis' door. Mrs. Kozlowski and Irena, along with hundreds of thousands of others from throughout eastern Poland, were shipped east in locked cattle cars. Irena's 15-year-old sister, Zofia, avoided the roundup because she was at school when the authorities came, and her mother said she'd run away.
After two weeks, Mrs. Kozlowski and Irena arrived in a tiny hamlet in western Siberia. "The first thing my mother did, she wrote a letter to my father in the camp to let him know what happened and that we are here now." From Poland, Zofia also wrote him, but the letters came back marked, "Addressee unknown." All over, officers' families got the same response.
"There was no more contact with those in the camps, as if they disappeared from the face of the earth, which later turned out to be true, but we didn't know at the time. We were frantic." Questions were asked of Soviet officials. The answer came back - maybe the officers had escaped.
Then in 1943, the Germans, who by then had invaded Russia, found the mass graves at Katyn and exhumed about 4,000 of the 5,000 bodies. "They found Polish officers in full uniforms. They were laid in layers - everyone face down in layers - every single one with a bullet in the back of his head. That's important. They were not machine-gunned. Some had hands tied." The Russians always killed with a bullet to the back of the head, while the Nazis typically machine-gunned, hanged or gassed prisoners, Laniewski said.
The Russians apparently never expected the bodies to be found, she said, so they left identification cards, family photos and other papers behind on the bodies. A good 30 percent of the victims were identified. They were the missing officers from Kozelsk camp.
The Germans invited the Red Cross, doctors and others to inspect the scene. "They were very open about it." The time of death was placed in the spring of 1940. "Notice they were killing them at exactly the same time when they were putting us in those cattle cars."
But this was still wartime, so after their inspection the Germans covered the graves and left.
By this time, Mrs. Kozlowski had died in Siberia. Irena had married a Polish man by the name of Laniewski, and after the Poles in Russia were supposedly "freed" in 1941, she had gone west to become a nurse in a new Polish army being formed to fight the Axis powers. The army was in Iraq when the news of the massacre came through.
Although her father was not one of the victims who'd been identified, Laniewski knew immediately that he had been killed. In Russia she'd met one of about 200 officers who'd miraculously been saved when their train mistakenly took them to another camp instead of to the Katyn forest. The man, of course, had not known what had happened to the other officers, but he said her father had not been among his group.
No one has ever found the bodies of the 10,000 missing Polish officers from the other two camps. "Certainly they killed them." There were rumors of barges being sunk in the White Sea, but nothing was proven, Laniewski said.
"From Stalin's maniacal point of view he had to kill those Polish officers," she surmised, because he knew he was not going to free Poland after the war and he had to eliminate patriots who might pose a threat. "And here, like the fruit that fell into his hands, he had all those people in those camps."
The Soviets continued to deny responsibility for Katyn. Because of Polish demands, they finally created a cemetery at the site, but in an inscription on a wall there is a dedication "to the Polish officers, victims of Hitler's fascism, killed by them in 1941." That, Laniewski said, "is a pack of lies.
"They were not Germans who killed them. The murder took place in 1940, not by Hitler fascists but by Soviet security forces or whatever they like to call them."