Years ago, Irena Laniewski's mother asked her to give her father a message. Late last April she was finally able to do it - thanks to ABC.
Laniewski, who has lived in Sandy for about a year, was invited to accompany correspondent Stone Phillips to a little cemetery in western Russia where the victims of a brutal massacre are buried. Phillips was going to do a story on the massacre, which will air tonight on 20/20 (9 p.m., Ch. 4), and Laniewski's father was one of the victims. And so, for that matter, was Laniewski.As reported by staff writer Valerie Schulthies in Thursday's Deseret News, Laniewski last saw her father on Sept. 12, 1939, as he drove away on his motorcycle from the family home near the Polish-Soviet border. Soviet tanks had invaded Poland, and he was an officer in the Polish army going off to fight the foe.
"He said goodbye to my mother," Laniewski tells Phillips in the "20/20" report. "They knelt down between their beds, embraced and said prayer together. He said goodbye to us, sat on his motorcycle and left. My mother still ran after the motorcycle - to see the dust."
About a month later the family learned that he had been captured and was being held prisoner in Russia. But before any more word could come from him, Laniewski and her mother were relocated to a labor camp in Siberia (her sister Zofia escaped arrest). While there, her mother woke her up one morning to say that she was dying.
"And she says, `When you see your father, tell him that I loved him all my life,' " Laniewski said. "And with that, she died."
All hope that she would be able to personally deliver that message to her father died, too, when the bodies of 5,000 Polish officers were discovered in Russia's Katyn Forest in early 1943. The horrors of that discovery are well documented in the "20/20" piece, with gruesome footage and heartbreaking detail. Josef Stalin tried to blame the massacre on Adolf Hitler, and Hitler put the blame back on Stalin. Today, Phillips reports, it's clear that the Soviets were responsible for the bloodshed.
At the time, none of that mattered to Laniewski, who was then a 22-year-old trying to survive the horrors of war by herself. But today she yearns for the Soviets to make "some acknowledgment of what they did . . . it will just be the thing to do."
Just like making a pilgrimage to Katyn was the thing for Laniewski and her sister to do. But financially that had seemed impossible until she saw ABC's ad in New York City's Polish American News Daily seeking widows of Katyn victims. Laniewski wrote and said that while some Katyn widows are alive, most are quite frail and probably don't speak English, so maybe they would prefer an interview with a daughter instead.
ABC liked the idea and offered to pay for the sisters' trip to Katyn. They had plenty of experts on the massacre, they told Laniewski, "but they wanted somebody who was personally affected by that murder."
So Phillips and an ABC crew followed them and documented the reaction to the massacre through their eyes. "They were subtle and considerate," Laniewski said. "They didn't push themselves on the people. They didn't photograph emotional moments. They were very proper."
In fact, at one point producer Ene Riisna asked if they wanted to be left alone for a little while. "We had about an hour to walk around in complete silence," Laniewski said. "All we could hear was the birds singing. We talked and we cried."
Plenty of that emotion comes across in the "20/20" segment, which is sensitively handled by Phillips and the rest of his crew. And as for that message. . .
"I delivered it, to this . . . this soil here," Laniewski tells Phillips. "I remembered my mother's last words. And I repeated them here. I did."