Priest-survivor of Soviet massacre condemns Russian ruling

Published: 2005-03-18

WARSAW, Poland (CNS) -- A Catholic priest who survived a 1940 Soviet massacre of Polish officers condemned a Russian prosecutor's ruling that the crime cannot be considered an act of genocide. "If this isn't genocide, then what is?" said 86-year-old Father Zdzislaw Peszkowski, chaplain of Poland's Katyn Families Association. "What should all the widows and orphaned families say whose husbands, fathers, uncles and grandfathers were murdered? Doesn't the crying, screaming and pain of these people play any role?" he asked. In the spring of 1940, Soviet forces shot more than 21,000 interned officers in the Katyn Forest, in what was then eastern Poland, in a campaign to destroy national morale. Around 2,000 Soviet secret police were involved in the killings, which were ordered March 5, 1940, by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

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