Class VI
Łączna, 13 November 1946
What the mass graves tell us
When the war broke out in 1939 and the Germans occupied all of Poland, they started persecuting Poles, and mainly the youth, who were caught in villages and cities and deported to Germany. The youth, eager for the country to be quickly freed of the occupier, started to organize themselves into partisan groups. When there were a great many partisans in the forests, the Germans started to track them down and destroy them in sweeps; however, their efforts were to a large degree fruitless. But many partisans perished in the forests and villages, and this is attested to by the great number of lonely graves.
Once Poland was liberated, the nation, in appreciation of what the partisans had done for the country, collected their bodies from these sites and placed them in collective graves, which will remind future generations of the Poles’ suffering and perseverance, and of their love of their homeland, as well as of our hatred of our eternal enemy.
We, the young people of school-going age organized in the Polish Red Cross, were the first to take upon ourselves the duty of caring for these graves, honoring those who had perished while fighting for the freedom of the homeland.