Miejsce straceń w Laskach

Description

Warsaw – as the main cultural and political centre on Polish lands – together with its immediate vicinity was particularly affected by the Nazi terror during the Second World War (the so-called “Warsaw ring of death”). The Germans considered the areas of the Kampinos Forest a perfect place to perform secret mass executions aimed at exterminating Polish elites and Jewish populace. At first, the executions were mainly conducted on the so-called “death glade” in Palmiry. But when the murders committed there became public knowledge, the Germans started to look for more discrete places. Not much is known about the murder in Laski. The exhumations weren’t performed here until the spring of 1947. Corpses of 155 people were discovered in four mass graves. It wasn’t possible to identify any of the 21 and 23 men lying in the first two graves. From among the 55 victims buried in the third grave – 15 were recognized – they were Warsaw Jews arrested in the summer and autumn of 1942. According to historians they were probably prisoners of the work camp operating in the area of the forest. The fourth grave contained the highest number of bodies – 61 people including 8 women had been buried there. From among the 10 identified victims, also in this case all of them were of Jewish origin. The local populace associates the murder with the time of termination of the Warsaw ghetto (therefore it must have happened in the summer of 1942 or after the uprising in the ghetto in the spring of 1943. The exhumed remains were in most cases buried at the cemetery in Palmiry, the rest at the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa street in Warsaw.

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