Political Quotes

“I rise today to remind my fellow Americans of a horrific tragedy which occurred in Poland six decades ago. April 13 serves as a day of remembrance of this terrible massacre. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland to begin World War II. Two weeks later, in accordance with the secret Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East and completed the partition of this nation. The Soviet invasion lasted eleven days and resulted in the forced deportation of 1.5 million Poles to Russian labor camps. Of those 1.5 million, approximately 15,000 Polish military officers disappeared under mysterious circumstances. On June 22, 1941, tensions between Germany and the Soviet Union exploded as the German army stormed into Soviet territory. It would take nearly two years before the German army would uncover evidence relating to the 15,000 Polish officers who had disappeared in 1940. In 1943, German forces near Smolensk, in western Russia, investigated reports they heard from Russian civilians to the effect that a large number of prisoners had been murdered by the Soviet secret police in the area nearly three years earlier. The German investigators were led by local Russians to a series of mounds in a wooded area about 10 miles west of Smolensk. On April 13, 1943, German officials made a gruesome discovery as they uncovered buried corpses.”