Katyn Memorial

My name is Anna Stanisz. I am Assistant Curator of Programs and Education at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

The form that we see in front of us is a block of bronze cracked in half by a powerful blow. And the rough edge of this cut, it's cutting very deeply, almost to the base. This monument commemorates the massacre of Katyn, which was the culmination of the slaughter of 22,000 Polish prisoners in the 1940s by the Soviet Russian Security Police. Actually there was just 8,000 officers, all the others they were lawyers, doctors, professors of universities. So that was really the top, the cream of Polish intelligentsia. This monument represents a very deep wound to the Polish nation that was done during this time. And the tragedy of the Katyn crime was also that the Allies, during the time when their friendship with Russia was still so fresh and so new, they decided to take their side and to accept that it was not their crime. And it took a long, long time for the West to agree to the Polish version of the event, and then for Russia it just happened last year, in 2010.

This abstract form very strongly symbolizes unity that was cracked by the power of the crime. I think that it's a very powerful symbol. It's very minimalist but there's a certain roughness there. There's this contrast of the smoothness of the block, this almost kind of feeling that how something so strong and so solid could fail. But it did because the blow was so hard and the wound is so deep.

But what is interesting if you look at that, I think there's hope there too. And this is what I like about this monument because the fact that this monument exists at all, it is already hope. And then you can feel that this block it's not completely broken. At the very, very bottom, there's this part that keeps it together and there's a place to start to rebuild it from.   

Runtime 00:02:20