The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

In fact, President Roosevelt had already been fully briefed on the events that had taken place at Katyn Forest. On August 13, 1943, Roosevelt received a classified British intelligence report accompanied by a personal letter from Winston Churchill, which made it transparently clear that the Soviets were responsible for the mass murder. The details provided in the report were precise and unremitting. In its pages, Roosevelt learned how the Polish officers had scratched on the train wagons “Don’t believe that we are going home”; how their letters to their relatives had abruptly stopped in March 1940; how Katyn Forest had been a well-known killing ground of the NKVD, “used by the Bolsheviks in 1919 as a convenient place for the killing of many Tsarist officers”; how “if a man struggled, the executioner threw his coat over his head, tying it around his neck and leading him hooded to the pits edge—in many cases a body was found to be thus hooded and the coat to have been pierced by a bullet where it covered the base of the skull”; how the bullets penetrated the skulls from close range or with the muzzle pressed against the base of the neck; how the wounds were regular, as if fired by experienced hands; how the bodies had been stabbed with four-edged bayonets of Soviet issue. The report read as a letter of protest from its author, the British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, Owen O’Malley: