Tomasz Dziedzic

Doctor Robel’s Katyn Files. The Creation and History of the So-called Robel Archive and the Silhouette of Its Founder
In the first half of 1943 an exhumation of the bodies of Polish officers was carried out in Katyn. The objects found by the bodies and particularly those which could have some significance from the point of view of establishing the identity of the victims, such as all kinds of documents, were sent to Krakow. Subsequently at the request of the Polish Red Cross, a team of Polish experts under the supervision of Dr. Jan Zygmunt Robel carried out an examination of the so called Katyń legacy in the Chemical Branch of the local State Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminology. Apart from the officially commissioned task aimed at identifying the victims, the team of experts from the Chemical Branch of the Institute also examined clandestinely the circumstances of death of the Polish offi cers. In the effect of these analyses, there arose a so called Robel Archive – a collection of documents containing a detailed description of the objects exhumed from the Katyn graves as well as copies of the documents found by the bodies, including all kinds of notes and memoirs. The investigation work carried out by the Polish experts was suddenly interrupted in the summer of 1944 when the Katyn legacy was transported by the Germans in the western direction and probably destroyed. However the Robel Archive avoided a similar plight. Although one of its copies fell into Soviet hands, Dr. Robel managed to successfully hide two other copies, in spite of his arrest and interrogation by the NKWD (Soviet Intelligence Service). After having been found in 1991, the materials constitute a valuable though so far little insufficiently researched historical source.

The History of the Bison in the Bialowieza Forest

The bison (Bison bonasus L.) has inhabited the forests of Europe for thousands of years. The above fact is best borne out by the numerous images of these animals to be found on the walls of caves – the dwelling places of the pre-historic man. Yet the development of civilization has led to a gradual extinction of the bison in individual countries, among others, due to hunting, which was willingly indulged in by the feudal elites and the catching of these animals and exporting them to the zoos and private breeding stations. Except for Poland, this species had become extinct before the end of the 18th century, whereas by the next century, it was only the Bialowieza Forest in Poland that remained its only sanctuary. Since the year 1809 an annual registration of the bison has been carried out there; at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the number of these animals oscillated around a few hundred specimen. Yet the situation changed during World War I. Already during the German occupation of the territory of the Bialowieza Forest, a rapid drop in the number of bisons could be observed, whereas during the period of anarchy which followed shortly after the withdrawal of the Germans, in the first half of 1919, these animals became totally exterminated. Four years later, an International Association for Bison Protection was founded from the initiative of Dr. Jan Sztolcman (the then vice-director of the National Natural History Museum in Warsaw). The main goal of this organization, which grouped countries in which there existed closed bison breeding farms, was to increase the numbers of these animals; in its activity, the Society took advantage of the experiences of the “American Bison Society”, an organization whose aim was to protect the American bison. In the year 1929, the first pure blood specimens of the lowland bison were brought to the specially created bison sanctuary in the Bialowieza Forest and in the year 1937 the first bison offspring were born from these cubs. In 1952 the first young were release to the Bialowieza reserve and five years later the Bialowieza herd began to multiply in the wild. At present, thanks to the efforts of a few generations of activists involved in the protection of the bison, this species is no longer facing extinction.