“Let us pray for the souls of those killed...”

In addition to officials, there were many public figures and relatives of those who died in the Katyn Forest in the spring of 1940 on board the Tu-154. Here are the names of only some of those who did not reach the Katyn Memorial on that terrible morning.

45-year-old Andrzej Przewoznik, secretary of the Council for the Protection of the Memory of Struggle and Martyrdom, since 1992, has been engaged in the arrangement of memorial cemeteries in Katyn, in the village of Medny near Tver, and a cemetery on the outskirts of Kharkov. These cemeteries contain the remains of Polish prisoners of war who were shot by order of the NKVD in the 1940s. Przewoznik was a historian by education, but, having become a government official, he devoted his whole life to perpetuating the memory of the victims of Stalinist repressions.

48-year-old Eva Bokowska flew to Katyn to pay homage to the grave of her grandfather, General Mieczysław Smoravinsky, one of two Polish high-ranking military men shot by the NKVD.

63-year-old Stanislav Mikke, a historian, in 1995-1996, together with the investigators of the GVP of Russia, participated in the exhumation of the bodies of executed Polish officers. Wrote a book about it "Farewell, brave ..."

64-year-old historian Stefan Melak, chairman of the Katyn Committee, was the first to erect a Cross in memory of Katyn at the Powazki cemetery in Warsaw.

73-year-old Bozhena Loek, chairman of the public organization "Polish Katyn Fund". Her late husband Jerzy Loek is an outstanding Polish historian, the author of the book "Katyn", which went to samizdat in the 80s of the last century. For many, this book has become a source of truth about the Katyn case. The father-in-law of Bozhena Loek, Major of the Medical Service Leopold Loek, was shot in Katyn. “We have called Bozhena many times in recent days,” Alexander Guryanov, head of Memorial’s Polish program, told The New Times. — Bozena said: “Come, let’s pray together for the souls of the slain…”

Memorial complex in Katyn, April 10, 2010: President Lech Kaczynski was supposed to come here. But instead of his speech at the ceremony in memory of the executed Polish officers, a mourning service was held for the victims of the crash of the presidential plane.