The ceremonies took place on Wednesday, July 12, which is Poland’s Day of Struggle and Martyrdom of the Polish Villages, state news agency PAP reported.
Locals and officials, including Agriculture Minister Robert Telus, gathered in the southeastern village of Michniów, in the Świętokrzyskie province, to pay their respects to the 204 men, women and children who were summarily murdered by the Nazi Germans on July 12 and 13, 1943, for helping Polish partisans.
In a letter to participants in the ceremony, President Andrzej Duda said that Polish villages such as Michniów "were the pillar of support for the partisans and Polish underground state agencies" fighting Nazi German and Soviet occupation during World War II.
The president wrote: “The occupiers took ruthless advantage of the defencelessness of the rural population. Villages became easy targets, and so they were brutally assaulted. For supporting pro-independence fighters and for other violations of the orders of the Nazis and communists, everyone who got caught in the blind revenge of the persecutors was killed, shot dead or burned in their house.”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in a tweet: “During World War II, the Germans killed Polish villagers and drove others out of their homes on a mass scale. We will never forget it.”
The Polish Prime Minister’s Office wrote on Twitter: “Today marks the 80th anniversary of the crime committed by the German occupiers on the inhabitants of the Michniów village in the Świętokrzyskie province. They were cruelly murdered for helping the partisans. The whole village was burned. We remember.”
On July 12-13, 1943, Nazi German forces murdered 204 inhabitants of Michniów, including women and children, the youngest of whom was eight days old, the PAP news agency reported.
The massacre was designed as punishment for the support provided by the people of Michniów to Polish partisans, according to historians.
In the course of World War II, the Nazi German forces massacred more than 800 Polish villages, killing residents or sending them to labour or concentration camps, as well as stealing or destroying their property, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP, prezydent.pl
