Katyń Memorial (Jersey City)
memorial to Poles massacred by Soviets
The Katyń Memorial is a bronze statue created by Polish-American sculptor Andrzej Pitynski in dedication to the victims of Stalin's March 5, 1940 Katyn massacre in which thousands of Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders who had been interned at Kozielsk or imprisoned at Ostashkov and Starobielsk had been killed by the occupying Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. The memorial stands at Exchange Place in Jersey City, New Jersey, United States, near the mouth of the Hudson River. Unveiled in June 1991, the statue depicts a bound and gagged Polish soldier with a bayoneted rifle impaled through his back. The statue stands 34-foot-tall (10-meter) and is atop a granite base containing Katyn soil. Its base also depicts a Polish woman carrying her starving child in memorial to the Polish citizens deported to Siberia that began shortly before the massacre.
Plaque commemorating victims of September 11 attacks
After the September 11 attacks a plaque was unveiled on the front side of the pediment, saying:
NEVER FORGET! PRAY FOR ALL THE INNOCENT VICTIMS AND HEROES WHO DIED IN THE TERRORIST ATTACK ON AMERICA SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
The unveiling ceremony took place on September 12, 2004.
Relocation controversy
In April 2018, it was announced that there were plans to remove the memorial as Exchange Place was to be made into a park. Mike DeMarco, chair of the Exchange Place Special Improvement District, was quoted by The Jersey Journal as being in favor of the removal calling the statue "politically incorrect" and stating "I don't think the statue's appropriate for a major metropolitan area ... [The monument is] a little gruesome ... I can't imagine how many mothers go by and have to explain it to their children." In a tactical move in November the mayor withdrew his support of the plan.
“Katyń Memorial (Jersey City)” enters the record as memorial to Poles massacred by Soviets. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Katyń, Memorial and Jersey can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6378565. Authority coordinates are 40.716, -74.033. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1991, 2001 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Katyń Memorial (Jersey City)” 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.