Nasz Dziennik, 6 Jun 2001

Maximum 250 skeletons of the victims of the tragedy in 1941 have been found next to the foundations of the shed in Jedwabne. The Jews enclosed in the shed were shot at from German arms. These are the key conclusions after the archaeologists' three days of work.Because the Jewish side did not give their consents, the exhumation procedure has been discontinued. However, the IPN institute dares not admit officially and explicitly that Jan Gross's version of the 1,600 victims was a lie. "I cannot say whether there are any other graves. At the moment the exhumation procedure is over and will not be continued", said prof. Witold Kulesza, the head of the investigation department at the IPN, in his concluding summary of the three days' exhumation. The decision of discontinuation was largely influenced by the Jewish protests because of - as Leon Kieres, the IPN's president, put it - the Jews' religious sensitivity.

Prof. Kulesza also emphasised that the archaeologists made bores in a few other places that had been indicated to them, but they found nothing.The information from a few witnesses, who claimed there was another grave by the road that the column of Jews was led along, also proved untrue. The only site in which the remains of the victims were found was by the shed. After the exhumation works were completed, the number of victims was estimated to be "from over 100 to not more than 250". And this is substantially different from the 1,600 reported by Jan Gross.

Considerably less likely seems to be also his version that blames Poles as the main perpetrators of the crime.There were 89 shells of Mauser 7.5 mm, 1 cartridge and 2 bullets found on the site - all date back to World War II. These will undergo criminological examination in order to establish exactly which period of the war they go back to, as well as when and where they were made. "The melted bullet 'sheath' that was found amidst the remains comes from an officer's Parabellum that was a part of equipment of all German officers", said Lucjan Nowakowski, one of the prosecutors involved in the investigation. In his opinion, one shot was most probably fired inside the shed, and another one from the outside, perhaps fired at the people trying to get out of the shed. Among the remains they also found a significant number of valuables: Russian coins of gold and silver. According to Kulesza, this denies the allegations of the victims being robbed after they were murdered.

On Monday, Poland's Justice Minister Lech Kaczynski officially informed that no more that 200 Jews were killed in Jedwabne. According to him, the verification of the reported 1,600 victims is the most important outcome of the current investigation. However, the president of the IPN institute puts his emphasis elsewhere and says that on the basis of the investigation "it can't be denied that the murder was committed by Poles". In his view, German participation in the crime of July 1941 in Jedwabne is still to be explored. In his yesterday's interview to Polish Radio Station I, Kieres said that so far, it has been established that about 40 Poles and 8 German military policemen participated in the murder.

The exhumation of the remains of the Jewish pogrom in Jedwabne began last Wednesday. It was carried out under the watchful eye of the Jewish representative, Menachem Ekstein who is an expert on exhumation. On the second day, fragments of a concrete statue of Lenin were found, of the one that had been erected in Jedwabne already in the autumn of 1939 when the eastern regions of Poland were occupied by the Soviet Red Army. The statue's head had visible marks of being exposed to fire. This finding brought a change to the picture of what happened in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. Earlier on, as the investigation was in progress, it had been assumed that the remains of the 42 Jewish men were to be sought for in the cemetery. But the IPN representatives say that under the circumstances, the finding of the statue's fragments inside the shed's foundations implies that the victims carrying the statue were taken to the shed in which they were burned. Some witnesses had formerly reported that the men were forced to break the statue with hammers, and then to carry its fragments to the cemetery where they were killed. Then, their bodies were reportedly buried in the cemetery and covered up with the statue's pieces.

Maciej Walaszczyk.