Anniversary of Walenty Badylak

Flowers were laid yesterday on the Market Square in memory of a tragic incident that took place there 15 years ago.

On 20th March 1980, a time of marked tension in the run-up to the declaration of Martial Law, Walenty Badylak, a veteran of Poland's wartime Underground Home Army (AK) set himself alight.

Badylak committed the act in protest to the government's refusal to acknowledge the Katyn war crime, the Soviet massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers during the Second World War. He was also protesting against the degeneration of youth's values and the usurping of traditional handicrafts. Badylak himself had taken the profession of a baker in the post-war Soviet reality.

Katyn was a forbidden word in Communist Poland, and it was not until 1990 that President Gorbachev finally admitted that the Soviets had committed the crime. Until that time, the Russians had blamed the massacre on the Nazis. The Anglo-American alliance avoided the issue of the crime during the aftermath of the war. Poland is currently petitioning Russia for the release of all Russian files relating to the crime. The Russian state Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov currently holds that only half of the files can be released to the Poles as the rest contained 'state secrets'. At the same time he ruled that the massacre was 'not genocide.'