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WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE
‘A gripping reconstruction? utterly compelling reading.’ Adam Zamoyski
‘This is a grim story, thoroughly researched and brilliantly told.’ Geoffrey Alderman, Times Higher Education
The Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnesses.
Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake – the few survivors of the massacre and the Polish wartime forensic investigators – whose quest for the truth in the face of an inscrutable, unknowable, and utterly ruthless enemy came at great personal cost.
