The German executioners did everything they could to wipe out the traces of their crimes in the Valley of Death at Chojnice. Many years later, we have unearthed the remains of the victims from unmarked pits and are now giving them a respectful burial.
The ring found in the soil of Chojnice, where it had been buried for several dozen years, bears the initials C.S. and the wedding date of 20 October 1938. That sparse information was enough to establish the owner’s identity. It turned out to be Irena Szydłowska, a courier for the Home Army. According to witness testimonies, she was arrested in Grudziądz on 17 January 1945 by Gestapo officers. Several days later, she was taken by the Germans on a transport bound for Bydgoszcz, and all trace of her disappeared. She was only 25 years old and had a son who was less than five years old.
Szydłowska is one of the many Polish victims whose bodies were discovered in the Igielskie Fields on the northern outskirts of Chojnice – a place now known as the Valley of Death. Twice the Germans massacred Poles here: in the bloody autumn of 1939 and again at the end of the occupation.
‘With the utmost severity’
The nature of the war unleashed by Germany on 1 September 1939 was criminal from the start. The authorities in Berlin intended to destroy not only the Polish State but also the conquered nation.
‘Have no mercy! Be brutal! […] We must act with the utmost severity […] This war is a war of annihilation,’ Führer Adolf Hitler ordered in a speech to his supreme military commanders on 22 August 1939. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Service and the Security Police, issued a similar order in early September: ‘People are to be shot or hanged immediately, without investigation. The nobility, the clergy and the Jews must be liquidated.’
In the autumn of 1939, these instructions were implemented in Pomerania with particular zeal. The Selbstschutz, a paramilitary organisation composed of local Germans and overseen by S.S. officers sent from the Reich, including Ludolf von Alvensleben, a trusted confidant of S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler, played a major role in this.
The Selbstschutz and other German formations targeted the Polish elite, the Polish Western Union members, farmers, workers, Jews and patients of psychiatric hospitals. According to historian Tomasz Ceran, the Pomeranian Crime of 1939 – as the mass extermination is now known – resulted in at least 14,000 to 16,000 deaths, with about 500 in the Chojnice district alone. The real number of victims is undoubtedly higher. The German offenders made sure that no evidence of their crimes remained by destroying records and burning the bodies of the murdered.
They did the same in January 1945, when the Valley of Death in Chojnice was once again drowned in blood. The Germans executed prisoners who were being driven west in an evacuation column, mostly people arrested at the turn of 1944-1945 in Bydgoszcz, Grudziądz and Toruń. Historian Czesław Madajczyk estimated the number of victims at 1500.
Decent burial
Today, the authorities in Berlin speak of moral responsibility for the past, but like the plague, they avoid the question of financial compensation for the damage and injustice done to Poland. According to press leaks, instead of providing multi-billion reparations, they were only willing to offer around 200 million euros to the surviving ‘victims of National Socialism.’ These accounts fail to include people like Irena Szydłowska’s granddaughters, which is hard to justify morally. So is the fact that the current government in Warsaw wants to simply give up on reparations.
However, the Institute of National Remembrance remains and continues to fulfil its statutory tasks. Over the past three years, IPN prosecutors have found several mass graves in Valley of Death in Chojnice, with the remains of around 700 Polish citizens murdered by the Germans, along with numerous objects belonging to the victims, such as wedding rings, rosaries or flat keys.
85 years after the outbreak of the Second World War, it is finally time to give our compatriots a dignified burial. On Monday, 2 September, a state funeral for the victims of German crimes will take place in Chojnice, organised by the IPN and the Town Hall. Following a mass at the Minor Basilica, the remains will be accompanied to the local cemetery for Victims of Nazi Crimes. Well over a hundred coffins will make a powerful cry of a history that has never come to an end.
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