Second Lieutenant pilot Janina Lewandowska wasn't really the only woman, who died in Katyn, but the only female soldier who was shot there.
The date of 11 November 1918, being the day on which Poland regained its independence, is a symbolic date. Exactly on that day, an armistice ending the First World War was concluded in a wagon in the forest of Compiègne.
On 23 July 1920, the first ship from Vladivostok with Polish children evacuated from Siberia arrived in Tsuruga, Japan. By 1922, a total of more than 700 kids had arrived in the Land of the Cherry Blossom. Their first stops were the cities of Tsuruga and Osaka.
Volunteer Polish units in Siberia began to organise as early as the turn of 1917/1918.
On 31 October 1906 Marian Malinowski set off, as he himself put it, “on a journey into the unknown at government expense.”
He died on 7 July (25 June according to the Julian calendar) 1892 on the Siberian river Kolyma.
