Abstract
In this chapter we investigate how the 1940 Soviet mass murder of Polish military officers and civilians—the Katyn Massacre—went from being a secretly remembered historical event to an open symbol of Polish heroism and independence. For nearly half a century, there was a prohibition in Soviet-dominated Poland against speaking openly of these deaths or visiting the places of the executions, and a powerful counter-narrative of the perpetrator was propagated in order to shift responsibility away from Russia. However, through the narrative work of various Polish carrier groups, the Katyn Massacre was eventually brought into the public sphere where it called into question the nature of Polish collective identity, becoming a cultural trauma in the process.
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Eyerman, R. (2019). The Worst Was the Silence: The Unfinished Drama of the Katyn Massacre. In: Memory, Trauma, and Identity. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13507-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13507-2_6
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