There is a startling memorial at Exchange Place in Jersey City which not only depicts the slaughter of thousands of Polish officers more than 80 years ago but was also itself the topic of some controversy in the 21st century.
The Memorial is highlighted in Middletown historian and author Randall Gabrielan’s book, “Jersey City, A Monumental History” as one of the monuments to see at Exchange Place. This is a well-known area of Jersey City created in the mid-1850s by extending Montgomery Street on fill in order to enable the NJ Railroad & Transportation company to build a dock and terminal facilities.
Created by Polish-American sculptor Andrzej Pitynski the Katyn Memorial is a 34-foot tall bronze statue depicting a bound and gagged Polish soldier with a bayoneted rifle impaled through his back. It stands on top of a granite base that contains some soil from Katyn. The base also shows a Polish woman carrying her starving child in memorial to the Polish citizens deported to Siberia, a move that began shortly before the massacre.
The backstabbing portion of the statue was designed to recall the killings that occurred while Poland was defending itself from the German invasion, and the attack by the Soviets at that time was like “being stabbed in the back.” More than depicting the Russian forest, the word Katyn has become a symbol of all the betrayals the Poles suffered and to many represents Poland itself and its martyrdom at the hands of others.
The Katyn massacre, named for the Russian forest of Katyn where the atrocities took place, killed not only thousands of Polish Army officers but also intellectual leaders who had interned at Kozielsk or were imprisoned at Ostashkov and Starobielsk by the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the Soviet secret police, or NKVD, in 1940.
Since its installation at Exchange Place in 1991, the monument has been the subject of strong divided local opinion. Some residents view it as ugly, vulgar, and depicting too much violence and death to be in such a busy area.
Others view it as a graphic reminder of what Polish soldiers suffered, and see it as a darkly beautiful memorial.
Others feel the discomfort it brings to those who view it are the right emotions for a war memorial.
It all came to a head in 2018, when Mayor Steven Fulop said there were plans to move the monument to another location close by, as the area was being redeveloped and that particular spot was selected for a new Riverside park, forcing the removal of the statue for the new development.
However, the Polish American population immediately set up a protest and filed a lawsuit against the governing body, charging it was their memorial and they had not been included in any decision making. Others joined the Polish American protest, simply on the grounds they did not like the redevelopment plan at all.
Within days, the Memorial controversy became an international incident. The Polish ambassador to the United States went to social media to protest the proposed removal. Politicians in Poland charged Jersey City with disrespect of Polish heroes. The Mayor accused at least one of them of being an anti-Semite, prompting more possible legal action. The developer scheduled to renovate the area and remove the statue called it “gruesome,” causing the designer to call the developer a “schmuck.” Some questioned why the statue was in Jersey City in the first place.
That was answered with the knowledge that Polish Americans came to the area after the end of the war; that was a time when there were more political refugees from Poland than any other country of Europe and more than 10,000 of them settled in New Jersey. A group of Polish veterans wanted to design a memorial to show the tragedies through which they had lived.
But there was even more to the controversy, Old-time Jersey City residents did not like all the new development, commercial and residential, that was changing their city. Newspapers carried the stories from all angles, and the Polish American community expressed disappointment and betrayal one more time.
All the publicity, negativity, anger of the city‘s old-time blue collar workers, and the Polish-American community led to the Polish President, who had already made one visit to Jersey City years before, visiting the statue and saying a new location would be okay with him if it had to be. That brought another stream of protests and cries of “betrayal.”
In the end, with several heated council meetings, petitions signed and presented and a public referendum scheduled to see what the people had to say in the ballot box, the city council backed down. After months of controversy, five days before Christmas, the Jersey City City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance that the Katyn Memorial monument would remain in perpetuity in its location in Exchange Place.
