A reader sent this in without a comment. This was a rather famous crime in Poland that some used and blamed the Ukrainians when they had nothing to do with it. This was a 1923 crime in Poland during the economic crisis that engulfed the whole region with hyperinflation, which stemmed also from Germany. Unemployment was massive and the economy was in shambled. There was a band of “Roma” gypsies who were stealing food and animals in villages across Poland. Marianna Dolinska was 32 at the time with four children. In December 1923, her husband was arrested, leaving Marianna and her four children with no support. This was the period when many peasants’ children died of starvation. Marianna was distraught and assumed that she and her children would die of starvation. On December 11th, 1923, Marianna hung all four of her children with the same rope by tying it around the base of a tree trunk in the woods near Antoniowka. The next day, Marianna went to the police station in Kozlow, confessed to the murder of her children, and led investigators back to the tree where their bodies were hanging.
A police photographer took the photo you see here. The case became one of the most high-profile criminal cases in the Second Polish Republic. However, this photo was used on the cover of a book containing photographs depicting crimes by the Ukranian Insurgent Army (UPA) entitled Ludobojstwo UPA na Ludnosci Polskiej (which translates: Genocide Against the Polish Population by UPA). This was from 1923 – not 1943. It did not reflect the Massacre of Poles in Volhynia, which began in March of 1943 and ended in 1944. The estimated civilians that were ethnically cleansed by the Ukraians was between 35,000 and 60,000 Polish people. The majority were women and children.
This photo was misused for it did not reflect the crimes of the Ukrainians and the UPA’s Massacre of Poles in Volhynia,
which was so horrible it even shocked the Germans.
