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1941 rape and murder of Jews by Poles was 'genocide'

PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle 11.03.2013 12:31
Announcing the discontinuation of an investigation into the 1941 rape and murder of Jewish women by Polish men in Bzury, north east Poland, an investigator has said that the incident was an example of “racial genocide”.

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“I am convinced that such a fate would not have been met by any other women. These were Jewish women. It was racial genocide,” Prosecutor Radoslaw Ignatiew said on Friday, adding that the investigation into the brutal murder of 20 Jewish women in Poland in August 1941 was to be discontinued due to the inability to name either the victims or most of the Polish perpetrators.

The murdered women were taken from the ghetto in Szczuczyn in Podlasie province and told that they were needed to pick vegetables in a near-by field. Once there the women were taken to a wooded area where they were raped, robbed and killed.

Poles were shocked by revelations in 2000 that hundreds of Jews were murdered by Poles in the Jedwabne pogrom, also in 1941, in northern Poland – a crime that the then president of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski formally apologised for.

Since then numerous examples have emerged of similar crimes occurring in mostly small towns throughout Poland, as it was occupied first by Nazi Germans and then Red Army troops from the Soviet Union.

The Bzury murder case was reopened by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Bialystok.

In a trial by communist authorities in 1950, one man, Stanislaw Zalewski was sentenced to death for the crime – though the identities of six other men involved in the murders was never determined. (pg)

source: Gazeta Wyborcza

tags: holocaust
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