Today marks 71 years since the first transport of Polish officers from Soviet POW camps to the Katyn forests, the killing ground of thousands of Polish high-ranking army men, in what many argue was an act of genocide.

To mark the anniversary, over 20 historical reconstruction groups from across the country will attend the fourth Katyn Shadow March in Warsaw.

The march will begin at 15.00 CET at Warsaw’s Polish Army Museum, with the attendees, dressed in historical uniform, marching through central Warsaw to reach their destination at the Monument for the Fallen and Murdered in the East.

Around 22,000 Polish citizens were murdered on Stalin’s orders in Katyn, Kharkov and Mednoye in 1940, following the Soviet invasion of Poland from the east as the German Nazis occupied from the west.

Many years later, former camp prisoner, the late Stanisław Swianiewicz, recounted that while watching the trucks carrying away the POWs, he had not expected mass murder was in the making.

“Why were they not forced to march on this beautiful spring day, as was usually the case when travelling to other locations? Why were these extraordinary precautions taken? Why did the escorts have bayonets on their rifles? I wasn’t able to answer these questions. But back then it didn’t occur to me that this could be an execution,” he said.

Initially Stalin blamed the Nazis for the murders but the truth about the perpetrators of the murder was later admitted by the Soviet Union in 1990.  (ab/pg)