For decades, the forests of Bykivnia near Kyiv concealed traces of Stalinist crimes. Among the victims of Stalinist repression buried in the Darnytsia Forest from the mid-1930s onwards were Polish citizens murdered in 1940 as a result of the decision of the Soviet authorities that came to be known as the Katyn decision.
Polish archaeological and exhumation work at Bykivnia began in 2001. In successive stages of research, a team from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, led by Professor Andrzej Kola and commissioned by the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, examined all 210 burial pits. Objects indicating the burial of Polish victims were found in 70 of them. The remains of 1,994 murdered Poles were identified, and more than 5,000 objects belonging to them were recovered. Documents, fragments of uniforms and clothing, footwear, personal belongings and other surviving items became an exceptionally important source of knowledge about the victims. Their analysis not only confirmed the Polish character of some of the burials, but also made it possible to reconstruct the material traces of the lives of people whose lives were brutally cut short. Each of these objects is both evidence of the crime and a tangible trace of the memory of its victims.
The work at Bykivnia also revealed the extent of the destruction previously inflicted on the burial site. As a result of undocumented exhumations and the desecration of graves carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, it proved impossible to identify all the victims. This makes the surviving objects all the more significant, as they enable us today to reconstruct the history of the site and its victims.
This book is more than a record of the archaeological work carried out at Bykivnia. Above all, it tells the story of objects that survived their owners’ deaths and decades of concealment in the ground. A substantial proportion of the artefacts recovered from the Polish graves were subsequently transferred to Polish and Ukrainian institutions, with many finding their place in the Katyn Museum – the Martyrdom Branch of the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw. This publication is devoted to their history, significance and place within the Museum’s collection. The publication documents this unique collection from the moment the objects were discovered in the graves, through their preservation and documentation, to their incorporation into the collections of the Katyn Museum. It presents Bykivnia – the fourth Katyn cemetery – through the material evidence of the crime: personal belongings, elements of uniforms and equipment that have become not only historical artefacts, but also evidence of the Katyn Crime and tangible reminders of its victims. The publication includes a catalogue of the objects recovered from individual graves identified as the burial places of Polish prisoners. Each archaeological artefact is briefly described, with its dimensions and an illustrative photograph provided.
In the introduction to the publication, Sławomir Z. Frątczak, the Director of the Katyn Museum, wrote: After many years of exhumation work carried out by a team of archaeologists and specialists from Toruń under the direction of Professor Andrzej Kola, commissioned by the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, a significant proportion of the relics recovered from the burial pits at Bykivnia eventually found their “Home” in the Katyn Museum – the Martyrdom Branch of the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw. This publication is a kind of record of the creation of this unique collection of Katyn relics from Bykivnia. It is an important addition to one of the fundamental elements of the Katyn Museum’s mission: the collection of artefacts that are at once the memory of generations of the Republic of Poland, “Evidence of the Crime”, and a form of memento mori.

Product details

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Authors: Sławomir Z. Frątczak, Mieczysław Góra, Andrzej Kola, Adam Kuczyński, Dominika Siemińska, Michał Siemiński
Publisher: Graf_ika, Usługi Wydawnicze, Iwona Knechta
ISBN: 978-83-6560251-0
Language: Polish
Format: A4, hardback
Extent: 307, [1] pages
Year of publication: 2018
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