The 68th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s aggression on Poland, which took place only a few days after the German invasion on 1st September 1939, will be marked on 17 September. “In the territories occupied by Soviet troops the Catholic Church suffered a real Golgotha. In the years 1939-1941 over a million Catholics perished, or were deported to the gulags from which few returned”, recalls the bishop of Drohiczyn in Poland, the Right Rev. Antoni Dydycz, mentioning in particular the massacres of Polish officers perpetrated by Soviet troops at Katyn and Miednoje and for years (until 1989) passed off as Nazi crimes. “The Church suffered an appalling number of victims. Bishops, priests, religious and laity were brutally killed”, he recounts. To mark this sad anniversary, a new film by the well-known director Andrzej Wajda has opened in Polish cinemas: it is dedicated to the massacre of Polish officers between April and May 1940, carried out on Stalin’s order. According to very rough estimates, at least 25,000 Polish officers and non-commissioned officers were executed in cold blood by a bullet administered to the temple. They included the director’s father, Jakub Wajda.
