As Zdzisław Abramowicz describes the story, during one of his final meetings with Father Rączka, the clergyman recalled a story told by one of the first residents who settled in postwar Ocice. The priest approached the story skeptically. He was said to have remarked: I am, after all, a Catholic priest, and here I am preaching tales about ghosts.

The incident Father Rączka described was said to have taken place on Christmas night. Polish settlers who had recently arrived in Ocice noticed girls dressed only in summer dresses approaching their windows. They also heard knocking on the window, but when the head of the household went outside, he found no one. There were no footprints in the snow either. The incident frightened the settlers so much that they fled the house and moved to another area. The story of the girls in summer dresses was repeated a year later; this time, the next residents of the haunted farmstead were said to have seen the girls. These settlers were not as fearful: they did not leave the house, but decided to uncover the secret of the girls who appeared and disappeared.

What they discovered was more horrifying than ghosts. It turned out that Russian soldiers had raped and murdered three young German girls in that house. Allegedly, after the local priest arranged a burial place for the murdered and raped women (they were said to have been killed beside the road, where the site was fenced off and cared for), no one ever saw the ghosts again.

The subject of rapes committed by the Red Army in Poland between 1944 and 1947 was long absent from postwar historiography, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, although documents from that period show that it was a serious problem both during and after the end of Soviet military operations. This situation was caused both by the lack of research into sexual violence committed by Red Army soldiers and by the persistent traditional social taboo among their victims, which prevented them from “finding within themselves the voice that would enable them to speak openly about their ‘wartime experiences,’ while maintaining their dignity. (...) According to one letter from the Recovered Territories, in Olsztyn in March 1945, almost no woman between the ages of 9 and 80 escaped rapes, including gang rapes, whose victims were often every female member of a family. In a letter from Gdańsk dated 17 April 1945 and intercepted by military censorship, a Polish woman looking for work near a Soviet garrison wrote:

They wanted us readily because we spoke Polish. But when I heard that all those women had been raped as many as 15 times, I became very frightened and went back. (…) Once that night I was raped; that disgrace took place before my father’s eyes. (…) I was raped seven times; it was terrible.

source: Wikipedia

Father Władysław Rączka (1925–2009) came to Bolesławiec at a time when there was only one parish in our city. It was the Parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His work was highly regarded not only by the ecclesiastical authorities but also by the city’s community, which in 1995 granted the priest the title of Honorary Citizen of Bolesławiec. In 2004, Father Władysław Rączka retired. During the farewell Mass, the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Nicholas was elevated to the rank of a sanctuary, and Father Rączka was granted the title of Honorary Parish Priest and Custodian of the Sanctuary.

Zdzisław Abramowicz, a history enthusiast from Bolesławiec. A theologian by education, he has co-authored several books on regional subjects and is an undisputed authority in this field.