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Seventy years ago, on April 13^th 1943, the Katyń massacre was revealed to the world. It is worth to remember that the first information about discovering the Polish officers graves in the Katyń forest, was given by the German news agency Transocean already on April 11^th . Two days later the information was publicly announced on a press conference in Berlin. Following results of the exhumations conducted by German authorities with the presence of foreigner experts, left no doubt who had committed the crime. The Poles were slaughtered in spring 1940 what clearly indicated at the Soviets as the perpetrators of the crime. The Soviets declined any accusations and used the Katyń case to break up diplomatic relations with the Polish government on exile. At the same time the leadership of the USSR blamed the Germans of the crime and this version of events was valid in the Polish People’s Republic and other communist countries until the late eighties of XX century.

A breakthrough happened in 1990, also on April 13^th. A press announcement issued on that day by the Soviet news agency TASS, confirmed that the Polish prisoners-of-war were killed in the spring 1940 by the NKVD. The president of the USSR of that time, Mikhail Gorbachev, passed to  the Poles a huge part of the archival documents on the crime. Nevertheless, there was no the decision of the Soviet leadership from the 5^th of March about shooting about 22 thousand of Polish prisoners-of-war from so called special camps and Polish nationals imprisoned  in the Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. Only this important document was given to Poland two years later, what was the base to establish the number of the victims. 

In 2007 the Polish Parliament announced April 13^th as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Katyń Massacre. Joining this year's anniversary commemorations, the Central Museum Prisoners-of-War has planned to prepare an outdoor exhibition entitled "On the inhuman land. Polish prisoners-of-war in the USSR." Due to the current epidemiological situation, its presentation has been postponed to September.