Jan Obst: A Victim of Stalin's NKVD Security Service

After the wedding festivities were over my mother returned to Sosnowiec, while my father and I went to our home in Kesowo, in Pomerania. This was my mother's house, which she received as dowry from her parents. We stayed there a few days and then returned together to Poznan. There was a tension in the atmosphere. Soldiers were hastening to the army bases, fields were being blocked with barbed wire, and guardposts had been set up on the roads. But the summer was one of the most beautiful in memory.

We parted at the train station in Poznan, on a platform at which trains to Katowice and Opalenica were standing ready to depart. My father was returning to Sosnowiec, I was going back to spend the remainder of the vacation with my grandmother. We parted after a touching farewell on the platform. There are may farewells, but this one I will remember always. Tears streamed from my eyes. I would always be his little daughter, the only girl in the family.

My father was always proud of me, that I was doing well in high-school, that I could remember everything. When I talked with my father on that beautiful sunny day, I had no idea that this was our last conversation. I never thought that I would not see him ever again, hear his voice, good advice and praise. To us, father was a marvellous person with a natural grace, an inborn intelligence, and a readiness to help others. He was the head of a family with a peaceful countenance.

Up to 1939 our family's life was happy and serene. I still see him, in my memory. He was always in his very elegant uniform and impressed all with his manly athletic build. His eyes were unusually blue, full of warmth and goodness. There was always a smile upon his lips. His hair was light brown, graying a little at the temples, which gave him a certain dignity.

My father was a practicing Catholic. Every Sunday, even after he had worked a late night shift and was quite tired, we would all go to church together to attend Mass. He wore a small scapular on his chest. It had the head of the Blessed Virgin embroidered on black velvet.

Such sad holidays were shared by many Polish families. To compound the sorrow in the spring of 1940 my brother Mieczyslaw was taken for forced labor to Austria. We never received any news from my father. For years mother lived with the false hope that he would return.

Our search for him through the Red Cross yielded no results. On May 29, 1948 the court in Bedzin declared him deceased, using the date of May 9, 1946, with place unknown (sygn. akt 420/47). The Polish Red Cross in Warsaw informed my mother by letter dated March 16, 1960 (znak inf. II-0-5502/2) that father's remains were never found.

That same year, the museum of photography in Krakow organized an exhibit called "Lost in Katyn" which included my father's picture and personal information. Later in the church of St. Joachim in Sosnowiec-Zagorze a cross was dedicated. It bore plaques with names of residents of the Zaglebie Dabrowskie who were murdered in the Soviet Union. One of the plaques has my father's name.

In April 1990, 50 years after the crime of Katyn, an official admission was made -- that the prisoners held in Kozielsk, Ostaszkow, and Starobielsk were murdered by Stalin's NKVD Security Service.

The Polish Red Cross, with a letter dated September 4, 1991 informed me that my father had been in a prison camp at Ostaszkow, and was listed on order 033/2 from April 16, 1940 (page 205, position 98) issued by the NKVD in Moscow and then passed on for disposition by the NKVD chief of the Kalinin Oblast. I accepted April 16, 1940 as the date of my father's death.

In 1991 a book Murder in Katyn by Jedrzej Tucholski was published and it gave a list of the victims. There my father's name is listed on page 332, and in the annex list no. 033/2 (page 840, position 98).

I do not know if I will live to see the exhumation of the graves in Miednoje and the other places. Will my father's remains ever rest in Polish soil? The state of my health did not permit me to join those making the pilgrimage to Ostaszkow-Miednoje, the place of my father's death. I would very much like to place flowers there and light a candle. I participate in all the memorial observances organized by the Katyn Families organization in Katowice. Such observances are usually connected with a Mass said in the intention of the murdered prisoners from the Kozielski, Starobielsk, and Ostaszkow camps.

I had a happy childhood, but it was cut short by the outbreak of World War II which took my father. I continually live with his memory even though I am nearly 75 years old.

The truth and memory of those murdered by the NKVD should be always in our national consciousness, and be preserved for future generations by giving it a place in Poland's history.