We considered the destruction of Jewish cemeteries by the Nazis an act of barbarism. But let us look at what was done in Bolesławiec after the war?
The municipal or county authorities (party or administrative) ordered the destruction of a tiny Jewish cemetery dating back centuries, which was a historic architectural site with numerous, richly ornamented gravestones. The cemetery was not destroyed by the Nazis. It was destroyed by Poles. Who personally issued such decisions? Can this be established today? Perhaps that person is among us? No one in Bolesławiec preserved a photograph of the cemetery. Today there is a small green space here, crossed by a path—a pavement...
Another shocking matter. On Polna Street (the section between Ogrodowa–Słowackiego and Chrobrego streets), a retaining wall runs along the pavement. It is approximately 1.5 metres high. As can be seen, it is built from gravestones from the German Protestant cemetery located in Bolesławiec, where a municipal park has now been created. The trees in the park are what remains of the cemetery. I have the right to believe this. In the small wall on Polna Street, one can easily find fragments of gravestones bearing German texts written in Gothic script. If only at least fragments of these remains had been turned inward. Perhaps there would have been no issue, right?
Another irritating matter. At the old, now closed Catholic cemetery on 22 Lipca Street, there were more than twenty graves of Polish soldiers, mainly from the Second Polish Army, which passed through our town in the spring of 1945. These soldiers did not die fighting the German enemy. They died in other, equally tragic circumstances. As is known, a loaded weapon “fires by itself.” They say it happened once a year, only no one knows when... On which day and at what hour.
They also died while on patrol duty, sometimes shot by Soviet patrols. Relations between Polish and Soviet soldiers were not always as idyllic as films like “Four Tank-Men and a Dog” portrayed them. In Bolesławiec, just after the war, the Soviet army set up camps. Behind barbed wire, they placed all the Russians whom the Soviet troops found in lands occupied by the Soviet army. Everyone from the Bolesławiec camp was soon transported deep into the USSR: there, traitors—mainly Vlasovites—were identified and weeded out. Those who ended up in the Bolesławiec camp escaped and formed gangs. Polish soldiers and policemen died fighting them. Sorry, militiamen.
The graves of these soldiers in the cemetery on 22 Lipca Street were individual. They had traditional birchwood crosses and plaques bearing their first names, surnames, places and dates of birth. Their comrades-in-arms put them up. Some crosses had small photographs of the fallen, placed behind glass in a hole cut with a pocketknife by a fellow soldier. Yellowed with age and washed by rain, but still recognizable. The Municipal Public Utilities Company replaced the plaques and crosses every few years. That was good. Bolesławiec therefore had its own military cemetery. A Polish one. Next to the Soviet cemetery. On All Souls’ Day, the public lit hundreds of lamps and candles there and laid flowers. The names and places of birth were read out. Those who had gone to war and had been taken to camps and gulags from which they never returned were remembered. Every family had SOMEONE LIKE THAT.
In the 1970s, the cemetery on 22 Lipca Street was liquidated. The soldiers’ graves were excavated. The remains of the fallen were transported to the cemetery on Śluzowa Street and placed in a single mass grave at the beginning of the Avenue of the Honoured, which perhaps rightly no longer exists today. Perhaps it was also good that they were placed in a mass grave. Except that the gravestone bore the inscription: 22 UNKNOWN POLISH SOLDIERS... For God’s sake, these were not unknown soldiers!
The names were not carved on the slab because... all the birchwood crosses with their plaques, after the graves were opened, were piled up, doused with diesel fuel and... set on fire. No one from the cemetery authorities, no one from the management of the then Municipal Public Utilities Company, thought to write down the names. There is also no trace of these soldiers’ names in the cemetery administration’s records.
Who specifically ordered the crosses and plaques to be burned? It would be good to know.
And one last matter. At that same cemetery on 22 Lipca Street, there were several graves of Italian soldiers who died in Bolesławiec just after the war. The Germans had held them in a prisoner-of-war camp in Bolesławiec. After liberation, they left the camp and lived wherever they could. Before returning to sunny Italy in the autumn, several of them died. The graves of the soldiers from the cemetery on 22 Lipca Street were also exhumed and moved to the cemetery on Śluzowa Street. Along with the small stone crosses on which their comrades had carved their surnames, first names and some words in Italian. These crosses were placed next to one another, at a small collective grave at the foot of the cemetery chapel: on the right-hand side when walking from the gate.
They simply forgot to put up even a small slab or plaque explaining what these graves and crosses were...
KWS
(first and last name known to the editorial office)