This exceptional publication contains 325 biographical entries on officers of the Polish Prison Guard Service who were victims of the Katyn Massacre, as well as 28 entries on persons who went missing and may have been victims included on the so-called Belarusian Katyn List. Among them were prison governors, senior Prison Service officers and ordinary officers. As Colonel Dr Andrzej Pecka, Director General of the Polish Prison Service, writes in the Foreword: Each of them was an exceptional figure in the service, but above all in the eyes of his family. Each was someone’s husband, father, grandson or brother. Each had a life story that was brutally cut short in April 1940. […] We must keep asking ourselves one question: what would the Polish Prison Service have looked like had the Katyn Massacre never taken place? Or, put differently, what would it have been like had it not been for the bloody sacrifice made by the prison officers who were murdered there? Let this thought accompany you as you turn the pages of this unique compilation – the only one of its kind to have been produced to date. Let us look at the photographs and life stories presented here with respect and pride, while at the same time hoping that one day the whole truth will come to light.
The biographical entries are arranged according to the existing Polish war cemeteries, in an order reflecting the number of Prison Service officers buried at each cemetery. The largest number are buried at the cemetery in Mednoye, where the prisoners of war from the Ostashkov P.O.W. camp who were murdered in Tver (Kalinin) are buried. They are followed by those commemorated at the cemetery in Kyiv-Bykivnia, where all those murdered whose names appear on the so-called Ukrainian Katyn List are commemorated, although not all of them were killed there. Separate chapters are devoted to Prison Service officers buried at the cemeteries in Katyn and Kharkiv, as well as to those regarded as missing. It should nevertheless be emphasised that, in the absence of documentary evidence, any reconstruction of lists of victims in this category remains necessarily hypothetical, with individual hypotheses varying in their degree of probability. In the biographical entries, the author uses the ranks held by the officers in the spring of 1940, without taking subsequent posthumous promotions into account.
The author, Dr Tomasz Szczepański, invites anyone who may be able to supplement the biographical entries contained in the book to contact the Katyn Museum. It is worth emphasising that, in addition to published sources and the studies cited in the selective bibliographies accompanying individual entries, the publication draws extensively on archival and iconographic material held in the Katyn Museum’s collections. This includes the so-called Accounts of People Who Knew the Murdered, which often shed light on the circumstances in which the individuals concerned were taken prisoner or arrested.

Product details

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Author: Tomasz Szczepański
Publisher: Centralny Zarząd Służby Więziennej [Central Board of the Polish Prison Service]
ISBN: 978-83-66991-18-7
Language: Polish
Format: A5, hardback
Extent: 243, [1] pages
Year of publication: 2024
Not available for sale

Review: Witold Wasilewski [in:] „Przegląd Archiwalny Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej” 2024, vol. 17, pp. 363-370. (in Polish)