On the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the second – April – deportation and the Katyn massacre, we invite you to a guided tour of the permanent exhibition, combined with a meeting with a witness to history.

Date: April 12, 2025, at 10:45 a.m.
Duration: 90-120 min
Tickets: regular – 35 PLN, reduced – 30 PLN

“I remember having a dream. I was so little. I woke up on the train in the morning, screaming: ‘Mommy, I dreamed of Daddy!’ He was walking near the freight car, calling out: ‘Basiunia, Basiunia, where are you?,’” recalled Barbara Klein-Szymańska, who, as a four-year-old girl, was deported to Kazakhstan with her mother and grandparents. “At the same time they were taking us away – precisely on April 20 – my father was shot in Katyn. In the back of the head, just like all the others. My father and his brother Jan. My father was a reserve officer, and Jan was a career officer. Both of them fought in the 1920 war…,” she recounted.

During the tour, it’s impossible to overlook a beautiful photograph of the Klein family in the backyard garden in Supraśl – sadly torn apart, just like their happy life.

These and other stories of the mothers with children, widows, and orphans of the murdered in Katyn, Smolensk, Kharkiv, and other locations, who were deported in April 1940, will be explored during a special tour of the permanent exhibition. The event is specifically dedicated to the victims of the April deportation and the Katyn massacre. Both a visit to the exhibition and a meeting with a witness to history will provide a unique opportunity to better understand one of the most tragic chapters of Polish history. Visitors will have the opportunity to listen to accounts of ‘Katyn children’, in which they will present the fate of their fathers and families. This will enable participants to empathise with the presented stories, experience them more personally and perhaps see parallels with the stories of their own families and the thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals murdered by the NKVD in 1940.

This will be an extraordinary opportunity to listen in the silence of the Katyn Massacre Memorial to the personal memories of the victims of Soviet repressions – concerning the Katyn Massacre, the events of World War II or ‘the crime passed over in silence’ in the Polish People’s Republic – to ask questions and better understand the impact of the past on the present. The event, dedicated to the memory of the April deportations and the Katyn massacre, will not only bring closer the tragic fate of those days, but also emphasize the importance of cultivating the memory of the victims for future generations.