Who Fired at the Construction School Building?

According to accounts that have survived to the present day, the bullet marks on the building of the Construction School Complex were located at the chest height of a man of average stature—a clue suggesting that they may have resulted from shots aimed at civilians or prisoners during the passage of military units, as well as in connection with operations involving armies entering the city in February 1945.

The most important question is: what exactly happened in 1945? There are various hypotheses. One of them links the marks to the murder of patients of a psychiatric hospital who fled the burning building when Dymitr Draguński's armoured brigade entered. Draguński's own memoirs do not specify what happened to the victims. One hypothesis is that the women were murdered and buried in a mass grave.

However, other scenarios are equally probable: they may have been executions of German prisoners of war or local gendarmes. In 1945, the building of today's Construction School Complex was occupied by the gendarmerie.

Another equally probable version of events is that the executions were carried out by the Germans themselves against deserters, who may have fled en masse from areas affected by military operations amid the chaos of the fighting for the city.

As the front moved west after the Red Army crossed the Oder, mass evacuations and flights of Germans from Lower Silesia began. When, on 10 February 1945, troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front occupied villages northeast of Bolesławiec (Wierzbowa, Nowa Kuźnia, Pasternik, Modła, Gromadka, Przemków), panic broke out among the German population in Bolesławiec.

An important element of this story is also what happened to the marks themselves later. During the thermal modernisation of the school building in 2022, all the previously visible bullet marks were covered up. No one thought to preserve a testimony to those times and plan the renovation of the façade in such a way as to leave, for example, behind glass, a visible trace of the wartime struggles of 1945 left on the school walls.