WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 'A gripping
reconstruction… utterly compelling reading.' Adam Zamoyski 'This is a grim story thoroughly
researched and brilliantly told.' Geoffrey Alderman Times Higher Education The Katyn Massacre
of 22 000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnesses. Committed in
utmost secrecy in April?May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin for nearly
fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi
atrocity their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful
wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for
answers focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake ? the few
survivors of the massacre and the Polish wartime forensic investigators ? whose quest for the
truth in the face of an inscrutable unknowable and utterly ruthless enemy came at great
personal cost.
