Educational Visit of the Kielce Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance to the Katyn Museum
On Wednesday, 22 April 2026, the Katyn Museum welcomed participants of an educational visit organised by the Kielce Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). The visiting group included police officers from the Świętokrzyskie region, soldiers of the 8th Home Army Infantry Division in Kielce, and representatives of the Świętokrzyski Region of the Solidarity Trade Union.
During their visit, participants explored the Museum’s permanent exhibition, a place of remembrance, documentation and scholarship devoted to the Katyn Massacre. Particularly moving were the personal artefacts recovered from the mass burial sites at Katyn, Kharkiv, Mednoye and Bykivnia-Kyiv: military insignia, uniform buttons, identity tags, combs and other everyday belongings that once accompanied their owners in captivity. Preserved for decades beneath the earth, these modest objects now serve as powerful and deeply personal testimonies to lives abruptly ended by one of the most tragic crimes of the Second World War. The group was guided through the exhibition by academic employees of the Katyn Museum, Dr Tomasz Szczepański and Michał Erbel, who highlighted both the broader historical significance of the massacre and its regional dimension. Particular attention was given to the losses suffered by the Kielce region in south-central Poland.
Paweł Żołądek of the Historical Research Department at the IPN’s Kielce Branch presented research by historian Marek Jończyk, showing that 2,354 victims of the Katyn Massacre were connected with the former Kielce Voivodeship, accounting for around 11 per cent of all those murdered. More than half of them — 1,304 individuals — were permanently associated with the Świętokrzyskie region. They included reserve officers who in civilian life were teachers, civil servants, lawyers, doctors and other professionals, as well as career officers of the Polish Army and members of the State Police. Together, they represented the civic and intellectual foundations of interwar Poland — social groups that, under occupation, would likely have formed a natural centre of resistance to totalitarian rule.
For the participants, the visit was not only an important lesson in history, but also a profound encounter with memory: a meeting with tangible traces of Polish citizens whose service and lives were violently cut short, yet whose stories continue to resonate through the objects they left behind.
