Russian revenge

You’re a middle-class Pole living in modest bourgeois comfort in a detached house in the handsome Austro–Hungarian city of Lwow in 1939 when there’s a knock at the door. Two officers from the newly arrived Soviet army of occupation have come to tell you that from now on all bar one of the rooms in your house are theirs. Everything in the house belongs to them too, including all your mother’s lovely clothes which you’ll soon see being flaunted by the Soviet officers’ vulgar wives.

Or maybe you live in a fine old country house and your father is one of the war heroes who saw off the Russians in 1920. Big mistake that, because one of the Russians your father beat was Stalin and he’s had a chip on his shoulder ever since. By way of revenge, he has ordered the NKVD to scour the land for Polish veterans who beat him. Now you have precisely half an hour to grab what belongings you can and leave your home for good.

That’s if your father’s lucky. If he happens to belong to the hated Polish officer class, he will perhaps end up in Kalinin prison where he’ll be extensively interrogated. There, one night, he will be led down a corridor to an empty cell with a wall of sandbags in front and worrying stains on the floor, the door will be closed behind him to muffle the noise from his comrades, and a man with a brown leather apron and brown leather gauntlets will shoot him in the back of the head. His body will then be thrown in a mass grave with some 20,000 others in the forests of Katyn.

No matter how many times you read or hear about the monstrous things Stalin did, the mind still boggles at what an unutterable bastard he was.