(18 Oct 2021) The Polish town of Wojslawice held a memorial service for Jewish victims of a massacre there by the German military in October 1942.
Residents, local clergy and the town's mayor walked solemnly to the execution site on Thursday, as church bells rang out from the town's Catholic church and a trumpet sounded.
At the site, prayers were recited while mourners lit candles and placed stones on a new memorial erected over the area where the bodies are buried.
Among those commemorating the victims in the small town in eastern Poland was 94-year-old Boleslaw Sitarz, one of the original witnesses to the killing.
"At night they were not yet buried and the dogs scattered the bodies. It was a tragedy to even look at what they (Germans) were doing," he told The Associated Press.
Also among the group was Marian Lackowski, a son of another witness, who remembered being told how a meadow had flowed with blood and a child cried out for water from underneath a pile of bodies.
In the years that followed the atrocity, those who had witnessed it shared their knowledge with their children, warning them to stay away from the spot behind the Orthodox church where some 60 Jews, among them 20 children, were murdered.
Lackowski recalled stories of arms and legs in the pile of bodies that still moved days after the execution.
He has devoted years to ensuring that the victims receive a dignified burial, a mission he finally fulfilled as he gathered with Jewish and Christian clergy, the mayor, school children and other members of the town for the remembrance service.
After the graveside ceremony, the mourners moved to the town's renovated synagogue, where the mayor paid tribute to the multi-ethnic nature of the prewar town, where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews lived side by side
The mass grave site in Wojslawice is tragically not unique.
During the German occupation of Poland during World War II, the Germans imprisoned Jews in ghettoes and murdered them in death camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor.
They also shot them in fields and forests near their homes, leaving behind mass graves across Poland.
Those graves have been coming to light in recent years and the Jewish community and activists have been working to ensure that every site is officially marked.
The aim is to give the Holocaust victims a dignified grave and to secure the spots so they are officially recognised.
Agnieszka Nieradko, the head of a Warsaw-based foundation called Zapomniane, meaning "Forgotten", which is devoted to finding and securing unmarked graves, said the scale of mass graves started to become clear about a decade ago.
The person she credits with their discovery is Zbigniew Nizinski, a Protestant man whose religious convictions led him to pay tribute to the Polish Jews who helped make Poland a multicultural land for centuries before the Holocaust.
Nieradko and American-born Rabbi Michael Schudrich, who is Poland's Chief Rabbi, frequently travel to sites where memorial stones are placed at newly-found mass graves.
Schudrich said ceremonies, like the one in Wojslawice, give the Holocaust victims their much-deserved graves, and offers a sense of closure to people who witnessed the murders.
Some Jewish survivors and descendants also finally have a grave where they can mourn.
Nieradko says the sites of graves have been found thanks largely to the testimony of the eyewitnesses, of whom there are fewer and fewer.
Their memories are often preserved by children and grandchildren, but these are not perfect accounts.
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