The German executioners did a lot to erase the traces of their crimes in the Chojnice Valley of Death. After many years, we have extracted the remains of the victims from the unmarked pits and are providing them with a dignified burial.
On the ring, which had lain for several decades in the Chojnice land, the engraved initials CS and the wedding date: October 20, 1938, were preserved. This scant information was enough to establish the identity of the owner of the metal object. It turned out to be Irena Szydłowska, a courier for the Home Army. According to witness statements, she was arrested in Grudziądz by Gestapo officers on January 17, 1945. A few days later, the Germans took her towards Bydgoszcz and all trace of her disappeared. She was only 25 years old and had a son who was not even five years old.
(Source: DlaPolonii.pl)
Szydłowska is one of many Polish victims whose remains were found in the Igielskie Fields on the northern outskirts of Chojnice – a place known today as the Valley of Death. Twice, during the bloody autumn of 1939, and again at the end of the occupation, the Germans committed mass murders of Poles here.
"With the utmost severity"
The war unleashed by Germany on September 1, 1939, was criminal from the start. The intention of the authorities in Berlin was not only to destroy the Polish state, but also the conquered nation. "Be merciless! Be brutal! […] You must proceed with the utmost severity. […] This war is a war of annihilation" - ordered the leader of the Reich Adolf Hitler in a speech to the highest military commanders on August 22, 1939. In turn, the head of the Security Service and the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich, instructed in early September: "People must be shot or hanged immediately, without investigation. The nobility, clergy and Jews must be liquidated."
In the autumn of 1939, these guidelines were implemented with particular zeal in Pomerania. Selbstschutz played a major role in this – a paramilitary organisation composed of local Germans, led by SS men sent from the Reich, such as Ludolf von Alvensleben, a trusted man of SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
The victims of Selbstschutz and other German formations were representatives of the Polish elite, members of the Polish Western Union, but also numerous farmers, workers, the Jewish population and patients of psychiatric hospitals. Historian Tomasz Ceran estimates the minimum number of victims of the Pomeranian crime of 1939 – as this mass extermination action is called today – at 14-16 thousand, including – in Chojnice County alone – about five hundred. The real numbers are certainly higher. The German perpetrators carefully covered up the traces of their crimes, destroying documentation and burning the bodies of the murdered.
It was no different in January 1945, when the Chojnice Valley of Death was flodded with blood again. The Germans murdered prisoners from the evacuation column driven west. They were mainly people arrested at the turn of 1944-1945 in Bydgoszcz, Grudziądz and Toruń. Historian Czesław Madajczyk estimated the number of victims at as many as 1.5 thousand.
A Dignified Burial
The authorities in Berlin talk a lot about moral responsibility for the past today, but they avoid serious discussions about financial compensation for the losses and wrongs done to Poland. Instead of multi-billion reparations, they were ready – as leaks in the press show – to offer only 200 million euros for the still-living “victims of National Socialism”. People like Irena Szydłowska’s granddaughters have no place in these calculations, although it is difficult to justify it from a moral point of view.
Just like the fact that the current government in Warsaw wants to give up reparations by walk-over. However, there is also the Institute of National Remembrance – and it consistently carries out its statutory tasks. Over the past three years, IPN prosecutors have found several mass graves in the Chojnice Valley of Death, and in them, the remains of about seven hundred Polish citizens murdered by the Germans, as well as numerous items belonging to the victims, such as wedding rings, rosaries and apartment keys.
85 years after the outbreak of World War II, it is finally time to provide our compatriots with a proper burial. On Monday, September 2, 2024, a state funeral for victims of German crimes from the Valley of Death took place in Chojnice, organized by the Institute of National Remembrance in cooperation with the City Office. After the mass celebrated in the Minor Basilica, the remains were taken to the local cemetery of Victims of Nazi Crimes. One hundred dozen coffins will be an eloquent cry of history that has never ended.
Translation from Polish by Andrew Wozniewicz.
