Poles Meet Soviet Apology for Massacre With Tears

The Katyn massacre of Polish officers has seared the national consciousness for 50 years, and Poles received Soviet acknowledgement of responsibility today with tears from the memories and anger at the delay.

“I regret that my mother could not live until this day,” said Wanda Zadrozna, crying as she recalled her father’s murder in the Russian woods.

A statement and apology by the official Soviet news agency Tass today reversed decades of insistence that the Nazis murdered the 4,000 officers, as well as 11,000 others killed elsewhere. The Soviets had rejected the crush of evidence by historians worldwide.

But for Poles, for whom Katyn symbolizes a long series of Soviet crimes against their nation, the impact was defused by the decades it took to set the record straight.

“There is a great regret that it took 50 years and the wives of those people didn’t live until this day,” Zadrozna said.

“But whatever happens now, it is good that the truth will be finally written in history,” she added.

A leader of an organization called the Katyn Family, bringing together victims’ kin, expressed happiness at the admission. “I feel a great joy now that after so many years the truth has been revealed,” said Bozena Lojek, whose father-in-law died at Katyn.

She said there is no statute of limitations on such a crime, so the admission will have “many political and economic consequences.”

In London, the British government welcomed Moscow’s admission. Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said the “terrible things” that Josef Stalin did cannot be forgotten.

“It’s good that criminals admit their crimes,” Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said in Gdansk. Walesa called the Soviet admission “an act of moral justice which has been awaited for a long time.”

He said there must also be “punishment of those guilty of the genocide,” reparations stemming from the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939 and free access to Soviet territory that is “emotionally important” for Poles.

The Tass statement came during a three-day Soviet visit by Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski. Jaruzelski met with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and planned to visit Katyn on Saturday where an outdoor Mass in Polish was scheduled to honor the victims.