Post by kaima on Oct 6, 2014 5:41:11 GMT -7
Unearthing a Barbarous Past in Poland
By RICK LYMANOCT. 5, 2014
BIALYSTOK, Poland — Zbigniew Kulikowski stood at the crumbling edge of a muddy hole staring down at a trio of workers gently brushing the dirt from the yellowing bones of several intertwined skeletons.
In a little over a year of sporadic digging, more than 280 bodies have been pulled from burial pits in the sandy, red-streaked earth behind this century-old prison, anonymous victims of the Nazis, the Soviets or the Polish secret police.
Suddenly, a worker in a white safety suit scurried up, short of breath. More remains, he said, had just been uncovered in the back garden of a nearby apartment complex, built on what once had been prison property. Mr. Kulikowski, the prosecutor in charge of the case, gasped and grabbed his head with both hands.
“These are not burial grounds,” he said. “These are death fields.”
The grim past is never very far beneath the surface in Poland, where battling armies and ideologies left behind a catalog of 20th-century atrocities that the open, democratic Polish society of today is still discovering and coming to terms with. The bodies of victims have been discovered in hidden caches across Poland, including a few other sites in Bialystok, but nowhere in the numbers and level of ferocity that investigators are uncovering here today.
Continue reading the main story
In some ways, the unearthing of the bodies at the Bialystok Detention Center — built by the Russian czar in 1912 and still in use today, with 680 prisoners serving time on all manner of charges — may reveal as much about Poland’s present as about its past.
The dead here were not only wartime victims of the Soviets and the Nazis, about which opinions are fierce and united, but also victims of Poland’s own postwar, Communist-era security forces, Poles killing Poles, about which attitudes are decidedly more complex.
Coming at a time when extremist ideologies are on the rise in many places in Europe, some worry that Poland’s far-right parties might want to make use of the newly discovered bodies — many of whom were almost certainly members of the anti-Communist underground — as heroes to stir nationalist emotions. Already, far-right leaders talk about the “forsaken” soldiers, the anti-Communist guerrillas whose memories, they say, have been swept under the rug in Poland’s rush to free-market prosperity.
Continue reading the main story
For other Poles, there is a tendency not to want to examine too closely what happened. The gruesome discoveries have drawn little attention since the unearthing of the first body in July of last year, even though some of the dead and the killers may have been relatives of people whizzing past the prison today on bustling Copernicus Street.
“People don’t talk about it,” said Maciej Bialous, a sociologist at the University of Bialystok who has conducted a study of the social attitudes of the area’s residents. “It’s not part of the mainstream Polish conversation. Some people don’t know about it, others don’t care and a lot of people just want to forget it.”
Marcin Zwolski, a historian for Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance whose 10 years of research led to the discovery, said he and others who investigated the era’s killings had initially received anonymous threats — and bricks through windows — as they went about their work. Even now, with the wartime generation having grown very old and the threats subsiding, there remains a reluctance to delve too deeply into what happened.
Continue reading the main story
“Some people still feel it is still safer not to talk about such matters,” Dr. Zwolski said. “People are also worried about what might be revealed about their own families, or their neighbors.”
“Investigation Area,” the sign says on the fence surrounding the muddy field. “Access Denied.”
The garden has been scraped of trees and grass. A pigsty and two silos that were once part of the prison complex are gone. Only a small, wooden structure remains, a former recreational facility for the guards — built atop a former pickle cellar where three more bodies were recently found — where the investigators have set up shop.
“My job is to determine the sex, the age, the height, anything that can tell us what the person looked like and how they died,” said Ivana Teul, an anthropologist, as she painstakingly assembled the jigsaw of bones from one victim. “Here is a cracked rib,” she said, “And look, most of the back teeth are gone.”
There are no signs of bullet wounds, unlike the skull on the adjacent table, and no indications of malnutrition, like the young child’s bones stacked in a box nearby.
When she has finished her assessment, she takes a few bits of genetic material across the room to Andrzej Ossowski, the team’s geneticist. He loads the information into a national database of the victims of violence and compares it with samples taken from people who lost relatives in the war. If he is lucky, there is a match.
“So far, we have made 40 identifications,” Mr. Ossowski said, including some killed in Warsaw and at other sites. “We have many more to go.”
Before the digging began last year, Dr. Zwolski had spent a decade studying the archives of the Polish underground, army intelligence files, court documents, journals kept by prison officials. He thinks he has a rough idea of how many people were killed here and why they were buried in secret.
“They didn’t want anyone giving respect to the dead people,” he said.
The killings began in September 1939, when the Soviets poured across the border and occupied eastern Poland. Researchers have the names of more than 100 people who went into the prison and disappeared, their bodies nowhere to be found in nearby cemeteries. Some were local officials, others soldiers or those who aided them.
From 1941 to 1944, it was the Nazis’ turn, and the killing accelerated. “We know that 6,000 people died in the Bialystok area, most of them executed and buried out in the forest,” Dr. Zwolki said. Most of the region’s Jews were killed in this way, or sent to the death camps.
Others, including many prominent local citizens, were brought to the Bialystok prison and kept as hostages. Around two dozen death sentences were handed down. But many others — estimates run from 200 to 300 — were simply killed by the Nazis without ceremony, or left to die in a typhoid epidemic that swept the prison.
Less is known about the killings after the war, when a Soviet-backed Communist government took power. Some 250 death sentences were recorded and most of the bodies are believed to be here, somewhere. Many more undoubtedly were killed with no paper trail.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
“We are afraid we are never going to know the exact number,” Dr. Zwolski said.
Sometime in the mid-1950s, the killing moved indoors, to the basement of the prison’s administration building — perhaps because new high-rise apartments afforded a view of the garden.
“Here is how it worked,” said Maj. Wojciech Januszewski, a 20-year veteran at the prison who has held many jobs and is now the facility’s liaison officer to the investigation. “The prisoners were brought across this yard and into that building, then down to the basement. A car drove up, right about here, and security police in long black coats emerged. They left the car running, went inside, shot the prisoners in the head and left through that gate.”
In 1956, following a shift in Soviet policy, the killings stopped.
Mr. Kulikowski, the prosecutor, made his way across the field, his boots sucking in the mud. Three of his workers were struggling with the hard earth in a hole between a pair of decorative shrubs behind a modern apartment complex with red balconies. Someone’s wash hung from a line overhead.
He looked down the long row of gardens and back toward the earlier prison excavations 100 yards away. So much cold, unbroken ground still to be searched.
“This place is like a museum of war and all the nonsense that is war,” he said. “You have the perpetrators who once killed and then were killed themselves, just one sick ideology after another.”
By RICK LYMANOCT. 5, 2014
BIALYSTOK, Poland — Zbigniew Kulikowski stood at the crumbling edge of a muddy hole staring down at a trio of workers gently brushing the dirt from the yellowing bones of several intertwined skeletons.
In a little over a year of sporadic digging, more than 280 bodies have been pulled from burial pits in the sandy, red-streaked earth behind this century-old prison, anonymous victims of the Nazis, the Soviets or the Polish secret police.
Suddenly, a worker in a white safety suit scurried up, short of breath. More remains, he said, had just been uncovered in the back garden of a nearby apartment complex, built on what once had been prison property. Mr. Kulikowski, the prosecutor in charge of the case, gasped and grabbed his head with both hands.
“These are not burial grounds,” he said. “These are death fields.”
The grim past is never very far beneath the surface in Poland, where battling armies and ideologies left behind a catalog of 20th-century atrocities that the open, democratic Polish society of today is still discovering and coming to terms with. The bodies of victims have been discovered in hidden caches across Poland, including a few other sites in Bialystok, but nowhere in the numbers and level of ferocity that investigators are uncovering here today.
Continue reading the main story
In some ways, the unearthing of the bodies at the Bialystok Detention Center — built by the Russian czar in 1912 and still in use today, with 680 prisoners serving time on all manner of charges — may reveal as much about Poland’s present as about its past.
The dead here were not only wartime victims of the Soviets and the Nazis, about which opinions are fierce and united, but also victims of Poland’s own postwar, Communist-era security forces, Poles killing Poles, about which attitudes are decidedly more complex.
Coming at a time when extremist ideologies are on the rise in many places in Europe, some worry that Poland’s far-right parties might want to make use of the newly discovered bodies — many of whom were almost certainly members of the anti-Communist underground — as heroes to stir nationalist emotions. Already, far-right leaders talk about the “forsaken” soldiers, the anti-Communist guerrillas whose memories, they say, have been swept under the rug in Poland’s rush to free-market prosperity.
Continue reading the main story
For other Poles, there is a tendency not to want to examine too closely what happened. The gruesome discoveries have drawn little attention since the unearthing of the first body in July of last year, even though some of the dead and the killers may have been relatives of people whizzing past the prison today on bustling Copernicus Street.
“People don’t talk about it,” said Maciej Bialous, a sociologist at the University of Bialystok who has conducted a study of the social attitudes of the area’s residents. “It’s not part of the mainstream Polish conversation. Some people don’t know about it, others don’t care and a lot of people just want to forget it.”
Marcin Zwolski, a historian for Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance whose 10 years of research led to the discovery, said he and others who investigated the era’s killings had initially received anonymous threats — and bricks through windows — as they went about their work. Even now, with the wartime generation having grown very old and the threats subsiding, there remains a reluctance to delve too deeply into what happened.
Continue reading the main story
“Some people still feel it is still safer not to talk about such matters,” Dr. Zwolski said. “People are also worried about what might be revealed about their own families, or their neighbors.”
“Investigation Area,” the sign says on the fence surrounding the muddy field. “Access Denied.”
The garden has been scraped of trees and grass. A pigsty and two silos that were once part of the prison complex are gone. Only a small, wooden structure remains, a former recreational facility for the guards — built atop a former pickle cellar where three more bodies were recently found — where the investigators have set up shop.
“My job is to determine the sex, the age, the height, anything that can tell us what the person looked like and how they died,” said Ivana Teul, an anthropologist, as she painstakingly assembled the jigsaw of bones from one victim. “Here is a cracked rib,” she said, “And look, most of the back teeth are gone.”
There are no signs of bullet wounds, unlike the skull on the adjacent table, and no indications of malnutrition, like the young child’s bones stacked in a box nearby.
When she has finished her assessment, she takes a few bits of genetic material across the room to Andrzej Ossowski, the team’s geneticist. He loads the information into a national database of the victims of violence and compares it with samples taken from people who lost relatives in the war. If he is lucky, there is a match.
“So far, we have made 40 identifications,” Mr. Ossowski said, including some killed in Warsaw and at other sites. “We have many more to go.”
Before the digging began last year, Dr. Zwolski had spent a decade studying the archives of the Polish underground, army intelligence files, court documents, journals kept by prison officials. He thinks he has a rough idea of how many people were killed here and why they were buried in secret.
“They didn’t want anyone giving respect to the dead people,” he said.
The killings began in September 1939, when the Soviets poured across the border and occupied eastern Poland. Researchers have the names of more than 100 people who went into the prison and disappeared, their bodies nowhere to be found in nearby cemeteries. Some were local officials, others soldiers or those who aided them.
From 1941 to 1944, it was the Nazis’ turn, and the killing accelerated. “We know that 6,000 people died in the Bialystok area, most of them executed and buried out in the forest,” Dr. Zwolki said. Most of the region’s Jews were killed in this way, or sent to the death camps.
Others, including many prominent local citizens, were brought to the Bialystok prison and kept as hostages. Around two dozen death sentences were handed down. But many others — estimates run from 200 to 300 — were simply killed by the Nazis without ceremony, or left to die in a typhoid epidemic that swept the prison.
Less is known about the killings after the war, when a Soviet-backed Communist government took power. Some 250 death sentences were recorded and most of the bodies are believed to be here, somewhere. Many more undoubtedly were killed with no paper trail.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
“We are afraid we are never going to know the exact number,” Dr. Zwolski said.
Sometime in the mid-1950s, the killing moved indoors, to the basement of the prison’s administration building — perhaps because new high-rise apartments afforded a view of the garden.
“Here is how it worked,” said Maj. Wojciech Januszewski, a 20-year veteran at the prison who has held many jobs and is now the facility’s liaison officer to the investigation. “The prisoners were brought across this yard and into that building, then down to the basement. A car drove up, right about here, and security police in long black coats emerged. They left the car running, went inside, shot the prisoners in the head and left through that gate.”
In 1956, following a shift in Soviet policy, the killings stopped.
Mr. Kulikowski, the prosecutor, made his way across the field, his boots sucking in the mud. Three of his workers were struggling with the hard earth in a hole between a pair of decorative shrubs behind a modern apartment complex with red balconies. Someone’s wash hung from a line overhead.
He looked down the long row of gardens and back toward the earlier prison excavations 100 yards away. So much cold, unbroken ground still to be searched.
“This place is like a museum of war and all the nonsense that is war,” he said. “You have the perpetrators who once killed and then were killed themselves, just one sick ideology after another.”
