Poland Is Not Lost

The Parliamentary State Secretary of the Ministry of Defence attended a commemoration
held on the memorial day of the victims of the Katyn massacre. The more than 20,000 Polish
officers remembered during the ceremony had been murdered on Stalin’s order in World War
II.

“Looking back from the beginning of the 21st century, all that happened in that faraway forest
is incomprehensible", State Secretary Tamás Vargha said, pointing to the cruelty of that
“hideous" idea whose followers wanted to kill the leaders of a free nation in the forests of
Katyn.

The State Secretary pointed out that Poland has not been lost after all, since everything
that happened after those pistol shots and that thick forest is also part of the story of Polish
freedom, and has been coupled with the search for truth, tearing down the walls of silence,
finding out the facts and igniting the flames of national memory.

In his speech, Prof. Dr. Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert, the secretary general of the Polish Council
for the Protection of Struggle and Martrydom Sites said that Hungarians and Poles have
always been connected by a special link. He recalled the circumstances of establishing the
memorial and pointed out that Budapest is the first capital in Europe where a memorial park
has been created in memory of the Polish victims.

At the end of the commemoration the participants laid the wreaths of memory by the
monument to the victims. The soldiers of the Polish–Hungarian guard of honor presented
arms together simultaneously.

Photo: Mária Krasznai-Nehrebeczky