Bayoneted rifle embedded in his back, hands ignominiously bound at the wrists, body frozen in an unnatural contortion – this startling image of violence often gets a reaction from passers-by near the Exchange Place PATH station, but few interviewed last week said they knew what the sculpture was for.
Jersey City resident Mary Kearney admitted she doesn’t know the story behind the memorial that she passes each day on her way to work in Exchange Place – but she was willing to take a guess.
“It’s meaningful, patriotic. I guess it represents freedom,” she said.
Crafted by Polish sculptor Andrzej Pitynski in his Mercerville, N.J. workshop, the memorial commemorates more than 15,000 Polish military men, intellectuals, and prisoners of war who were murdered from 1939 to 1940 by agents of the former Soviet Union’s secret police.
In the worst incident, several thousand Polish soldiers were marched – bound and gagged – into Katyn Forest in the spring of 1940. They were executed and buried in mass graves. For 50 years, the Soviet government denied any role in the massacre.
Every day, thousands of commuters pass the Katyn Forest Massacre Memorial, at the station’s eastern terminus on Montgomery Street.
Rough road to completion
The memorial was financed with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of donations from New Jersey’s Polish community.
The memorial was constructed starting in 1989 over a period of 18 months. The granite base was the first to appear, in September of that year – with no explanatory plaques, just the inscription “Katyn 1940” – leaving some Exchange Place workers puzzled about the monument’s meaning.
The mystery was cleared up the following spring, when plaques explaining the memorial’s significance were attached. At a special ceremony in April of 1990, a bronze eagle containing soil from Katyn Forest was affixed to the front of the pedestal.
It took another year to complete the memorial, when Pitynski’s striking sculpture of a dying soldier was unveiled with great ceremony on May 19, 1991 – 16 years ago this weekend.
9/11 plaque added to it
Sept. 11, 2001, opened up a new round of disagreements over the memorial. When the city’s 9/11 Memorial Committee suggested finding a new spot for the Katyn monument so that they could make room for a 9/11 memorial, the proposal was met with an outcry from Jersey City’s Polish community.
At a meeting of the 9/11 Memorial Committee in August of 2002, Stanley Paszul, a veteran of the Polish Underground Army, held up framed photographs of his father and himself in Poland following the war.
“Please do not move the statue,” Paszul pleaded. “What happened at the World Trade Center was an act of terrorism. What happened in Poland was also an act of terrorism.”
The words of Paszul and his fellow Poles worked. The committee agreed to leave the Katyn memorial in place, and Paszul himself donated a plaque to be added to the monument’s base, honoring the victims of 9/11.
Still controversial
The Katyn Forest Massacre Memorial continues to evoke strong, sometimes contradictory feelings.
“It’s a little brutal,” said Bayonne resident Scott Benedetto, who works near Exchange Place. “If you read the plaque, you can understand why it’s there, but I don’t see the significance of having a guy with a bayonet in his back so prominently.”
Yet the wax pools that perpetually stain the several levels of the memorial’s base – reminders of vigils past – prove that some, at least, still want to remember this way.
Christopher Zinsli can be reached at jcmag@hudsonreporter.com.