Notorious Holocaust-Era Mass Rape and Murder Case Closed by Poland
Image by Agenja Gazeta
New Case, Old Crime: Polish prosecutor Radoslaw Ignatiew examines files about a Nazi-era massacre of Jews in the small town of Bzury. Image by Agenja Gazeta
A Polish governmental institute closed an investigation into the 1941 murder of 20 Jewish women in northeastern Poland, unable to name the victims or perpetrators.
Prosecutors for the Institute of National Remembrance in Bialystok could not determine the names of the victims, nor did they discover the identities of six of the seven perpetrators who went on trial in the 1950s for the crime.
They had opened the investigation last June into the deaths in Bzury in an effort to discover the names of the victims and other perpetrators while there potentially were still witnesses alive to identify them.
One of the killers, Stanislaw Zalewski, was given a prison term after originally being sentenced to death.
Image by Agenja Gazeta
Prosecutor Radoslaw Ignatiew confirmed that the murderers were Poles, according to the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.
The murdered women from the ghetto in Szczuczyn were employed for field work in Bzury. They were taken to the woods and killed after being robbed and, in some cases, raped.
The Institute of National Remembrance was established in 1998 by the Polish Parliament to preserve the memory of the losses suffered by the country from World War II.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
