Katyń Memorial (Niles, Illinois)
monument in Niles, Illinois, United States
The Katyń Memorial (Polish: Pomnik Katyński) is a monument in Niles in Illinois, United States, located at the St. Adalbert Cemetery. It commemorates the victims of the Katyn massacre, a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out in 1940 by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union. The sculpture was designed by Wojciech Seweryn, and unveiled on May 17, 2009. The monument features a statue of keeling Mary of Nazareth, holding in her arms a dead Polish soldier, with a large granite Christian cross behind her, and a sculpture made from white stone, forming outline of a military eagle, a symbol of the Polish Armed Forces, with a missing head.
History
The monument was proposed and designed by sculptor Wojciech Seweryn, to commemorate the victims of the Katyn massacre, a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out in 1940 by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union. This included his father, lieutenant Mieczysław Seweryn, an officer of the 16th Infantry Division of the Polish Armed Forces. In 1994, Wojciech Seweryn founded the Committee for the Construction of the Katyn Memorial, and received a plot of land at the St. Adalbert Cemetery in Niles, Illinois from Francis George, the archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The fundraising activities lasted for nine years.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11823294. Authority coordinates are 42.005, -87.795. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 2009 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Katyń Memorial (Niles, Illinois)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.