YOU CAN'T SANITIZE POLITICAL CLEANSING.

The Katyn Massacre monument that stood near the site of the Exchange Place station in Jersey City will be moved to storage during a planned reconstruction of the plaza, and it might not be returned to its current location.

Plans to relocate a memorial commemorating the massacre of tens of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union in 1940 is facing opposition here in Jersey City and from the Polish Consulate.

The Katyn memorial, a 34-foot-tall monument depicting a bound-and-gagged soldier impaled in the back by a bayoneted rifle, has been a fixture at Exchange Place since 1991. The city plans to put it in storage during a planned transformation of the Exchange Place plaza into a public park, and the statue may not return to its current location.

Asked to comment, Poland's ambassador to the United States, Piotr Wilczek, said he is "concerned" about the sudden announcement that the memorial may be moved and by the "lack of dialogue" between the city and the Polish-American community.

It's not clear whether plans to move the statue reflect squeamish sensibilities, or fears by local businesses that in-your-face public art is unprofitable.

The park creation is a project of the Exchange Place Special Improvement District. Its chair, Mike DeMarco, who is also CEO of real-estate firm Mack-Cali, said it's the city's decision whether the statue remains there after the plaza renovation is complete. His personal preference is that it is moved elsewhere.

"I don't think the statue's appropriate for a major metropolitan area," DeMarco told The Jersey Journal. "It's a little gruesome ... I can't imagine how many mothers go by and have to explain it to their children."

DeMarco added that the notion that Russians are backstabbers is "not exactly a politically correct idea nowadays."

Um, mightn't that be good reason to leave the monument where it is, lest people take too sanguine a view of Russians, or of Stalinism?

It's all too much for civics teacher Betsy Newmark.

The time to have the debate was when the monument was put up in the first place. Now that it is up, removing it makes a statement about what sorts of victims, the city is willing to memorialize. It's a powerful monument and should spark valuable discussions of the event that is being commemorated and what exactly happened there. The city shouldn't try to erase that history. This isn't a debate over a problematic figure in history such as a Confederate general or a Spanish conquistador, but a memorial to the victims of the brutality of Josef Stalin and his secret police.

Those Confederate statues? Didn't those go up about the same time eugenics became a thing with self-styled progressives?  Teach that history, too, how all of a sudden leaders of a failed rebellion somehow become vindication of a now-failed academic doctrine -- but the academicians get off scot-free whilst anyone who has anything good to say about the old South is worse than a backstabber.

The Katyn monument itself?  I was in Jersey City in early 2000, looking for traces of the old Pennsylvania Railroad complex that was once there (all gone) and found this photo opportunity.

At the time, I was considering only the symbolism of previous authoritarians intending to bring low the buildings across the river (jihadis in 1993, leftist underground in the 1970s) and cannot help but think that the monument ought stay exactly where it is, in order that contemporary observers might look across the river, and reflect.