Jersey City council debates future of Katyn monument
PR dla Zagranicy
Victoria Bieniek
14.06.2018 09:15
Jersey City council on Wednesday decided to relocate a monument to thousands of massacred Poles after plans to remove it earlier this year caused a trans-Atlantic spat.
The Katyn Massacre monument in Jersey CityPhoto: Colin Knowles [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
A number of locals, among them many Polish-Americans, attended a council debate to weigh in on the future of the monument.
Some argued that taxpayers should pay to move the monument, saying that it should stay in Exchange Place, which has been its home for 27 years.
The debate comes after last month Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop said the monument would stand in a “respected place”.
He suggested moving it 60 metres to the Hudson River forefront, opposite the site of the terror attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.
He had previously said the monument would be put in storage while Exchange Place was converted into a park, which sparked outrage among Poles and Jews in the US and Poland.
The statue honours the victims of a 1940 Soviet massacre of some 22,000 of Poles, including in the Katyn Forest, western Russia.
The monument features a 10-metre-tall bronze figure of a soldier - who has been gagged and bound and impaled by a bayonetted rifle - mounted on top of a granite base containing soil from the Katyn Forest in western Russia where thousands of Poles were murdered by Soviet secret police during World War II. The base features a plaque commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. (vb)
Source: IAR, TVN