The remains of more than 700 people have been discovered since 2021 in mass graves in the town of Chojnice in northern Poland.
Poland on Monday reburied the remains of hundreds of people executed by the Nazis during World War II, discovered in Death Valley in the north of the country. The remains were discovered since 2021 by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), whose mission is to investigate crimes committed by the Nazis and communist authorities.
About a hundred people, including the president of the IPN and an aide to the president, attended the funeral mass held in a basilica in Chojnice, where the Valley of Death is located. The wooden coffins decorated with red and white ribbons, the colours of the Polish flag, were then transported to a local cemetery where the victims of Nazi crimes are buried.
Six million Poles killed
Six million Poles, half of them Jewish, were killed during the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. “We discovered five mass graves from which we extracted the remains of more than 700 people”IPN official Andrzej Pozorski told AFP. The institute will do everything possible to “identify the people for whom this is technically possible”he added.
The Nazis have “committed mass murders of Polish citizens, representatives of the local intelligentsia, including teachers, members of the clergy, landowners”the IPN said. Also killed were 218 patients of psychiatric institutions. Researchers discovered the bones of people killed in 1939 and the charred remains of victims murdered in 1945, archaeologist Dawid Kobialka said.
“The charred remains measure between one and five centimeters. We exhumed nearly a ton of them in 2021.”he stressed. “We discovered nearly 7,000 objects: cartridges, bullets and also personal objects of the victims that they were wearing at the time of their death.”he added.
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