Poland: Reopening an Old Wound

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.

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.

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.