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- <text id=89TT0554>
- <title>
- Feb. 27, 1989: World Notes:Poland
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Feb. 27, 1989 The Ayatullah Orders A Hit
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 46
- World Notes
- POLAND
- Reopening an Old Wound
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Ever since the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish officers
- were found in 1943 in the Katyn forest, near the Soviet city of
- Smolensk, their fate has been a disturbing blank spot in Polish
- history. Moscow has maintained that the cold-blooded killings
- were carried out by the Nazis after they invaded the U.S.S.R. in
- 1941. But Poles have long suspected that the officers were
- executed and buried in mass graves by Soviet forces.
- </p>
- <p> Last week the Warsaw weekly Odrodzenie published a secret
- wartime report produced by the Polish Red Cross and uncovered
- two years ago by a historian in Britain's Public Record Office.
- The report set the date of the murders between March and May of
- 1940, more than a year before the first German troops arrived.
- Polish officials, who presented the document to a joint
- Soviet-Polish commission investigating the Katyn massacre, had
- become increasingly impatient with Soviet procrastination.
- </p>
- <p> The Poles hope that Odrodzenie's story, the first clear
- condemnation published by an official paper in Poland, will
- force the Soviet Union into finally admitting its role in the
- atrocity.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-