Excerpt

Victor Zaslavsky has written a moving and powerful short book that is less about the actual events of the horrendous crimes of Katyn than about the mechanisms that produced them and about the cover-ups—both inside the Soviet Union and in much of the rest of the world—that followed. The crimes themselves, which are still poorly known in the world outside of Poland, took place in March 1940, both in the Katyn forests in Russia and in other camps in the Soviet Union where Polish prisoners were being held. The Soviets had taken the prisoners during and immediately after their invasion…