It never crossed my mind until this week but there are very few, if any, big cemeteries in central London. There is no space. Accordingly, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea bought 8.9 hectares at Gunnersbury in Hounslow in 1925. It was on the SE corner of Gunnersbury Park, owned then by the Rothschilds.
A section of the cemetery has mostly Polish graves and memorials the most important of which is the Katyn Memorial.
“The Katyń massacre (“zbrodnia katyńska” in Polish) was the mass murder of approximately 22,000 Polish nationals carried out by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in April and May 1940. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria’s proposal to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps, dated 5th March 1940. This official document was approved and signed by the Soviet Politburo, including its leader, Joseph Stalin.
The victims included approximately 8,000 Polish army officers taken prisoner during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, another 6,000 were police officers and the rest were Polish intelligentsia, university lecturers, doctors, lawyers, officials, priests and others considered to be members of the “bourgeoisie”.
The bulk of the victims were interned at three Soviet camps (Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków) before being taken to NKVD mass murder sites, where they were killed and buried in mass graves.
The graves of the Kozielsk prisoners were found in 1943 at Katyń forest. The fate of the other victims and the location of their graves was not known until five decades later. After the discovery of the Katyń grave site the USSR denied responsibility for the massacre and tried to blame it on the Germans – and continued to lie about the killings for 50 years until finally admitting Soviet guilt in 1990.
However, neither the Soviet government nor successive governments of Russia have ever permitted a full investigation of the massacre, and none of the perpetrators of this war crime have ever been brought to justice.
The monument in Gunnersbury Cemetery was unveiled on 18th September 1976 after much delay. The Polish community in London had tried in vain to get permission to create a memorial to the victims of the Katyń massacre for many years, which was prevented by successive British governments, bowing to Soviet pressure. When the monument was finally unveiled in 1976, no government representative was present at the ceremony.” (Wikimedia Commons)
Thank you for shining a light into this dark corner. For further thoughtful insight, I highly recommend Lucy Beckett’s 2014 novel The Leaves are Falling.