Pamiątkowy głaz dla zamordowanych Romów Szczurowej
A memorial and an honorary grave on the cemetery of Szczurowa in southern Poland commemorate the 93 Romanies who were shot by German policemen and Polish constabulary in July 1943.
History
Before the Second World War, about 100 Romanies lived in the south Polish village of Szczurowa, which lies about 50 km east of Cracow in the outer Carpathian Mountains. They had settled down in Szczurowa and were well integrated into the community. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the region of Szczurowa came under German occupation. The German occupying forces not only terrorised the Jews and the Poles in the so-called General Government, but also Romani people, who were persecuted as »Gypsies«. On the morning of July 3, 1943, German policemen and Polish constabulary surrounded the Roma settlement and arrested all of the residents. The police first brought the men, then the women and children, to the cemetery on horse-drawn carts. There they shot 93 Romanies of Szczurowa, after which they buried the bodies in a mass grave. Finally, they burned down the empty houses of the Roma. Only five Romanies from Szczurowa were able to escape the massacre.
Victims
93 Romanies were shot during the massacre of Szczurowa - men, women and children. The Roma community had lived in Szczurowa since the 19th century.
The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients.
At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS.
Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation.
Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland.
Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period.
The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.
Remembrance
In 1966, the residents of Szczurowa remodelled the mass grave of the murdered Roma on the catholic cemetery in Szczurowa and set up a memorial plaque. The memorial in Szczurowa was thus the first memorial in Poland - perhaps even worldwide - to commemorate the victims of the National Socialist murder of the Roma. In 1993, on the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre, village residents erected a cross and a further memorial plaque next to the honorary grave. The Polish inscription on the plaque reads: »On the 50th anniversary of the murder of 93 Gypsies-Romanies under the Nazi occupation, the residents of Szczurowa honour the victims in prayer«. Since 1996, the nearby town of Tarnów has annually hosted the »International Roma Caravan of Remembrance« (Polish: »Międzynarodowy Tabor Pamięci Romów«). In an event lasting several days, the participants deal with the history and culture of the Romani people. One of the destinations of the »Caravan of Remembrance« is the honorary grave in Szczurowa. In July 2011, a further memorial was unveiled in the forest between Borzęcin and Szczurowa, in honour of the Romanies who were murdered there in 1942.
