Forty years ago, on May 14th 1983, just three days before his nineteenth birthday, Grzegorz Przemyk died in a Warsaw hospital. Severe abdominal injuries were the main reason for his death. Fatal injuries resulted from a brutal beating by three militiamen at the Militia Station on Jesuit Street.

Two days earlier, on May 12, Grzegorz Przemyk was detained in Warsaw’s Castle Square, where together with his fellow students, he celebrated passing High School “Matura” exams. The militiamen decided that the youth behaved too casually, and the Polish People’s Republic authorities did not like it. The detainees were taken to the local Old Town Militia Station, where they got severely beaten. After being released home, Grzegorz Przemyk felt sick with terrible pain in his abdominal area. The ambulance took him to the Emergency Medical Services station on Hoża Street.

Up till now, the exact course of events has not been established. "People's power" always liked to show the young generation that they had control over everyone, and the best way to demonstrate this power was physical violence. The militia willingly reached for it in serious and trivial matters, so beating up a young man "to make an example" was not uncommon.

But Grzegorz Przemyk was the son of the opposition poet Barbara Sadowska. Several days earlier, he and his mother were detained for 48 hours. And at that time, his mother was also a victim of beatings. Even Mieczysław Rakowski – then one of the closest people in Wojciech Jaruzelski's circle – made records in his notebook and did not exclude such a possibility that the beating could have been a warning measure for those who were too defiant.

It was set right from the very beginning that the Polish People's Republic authorities would turn the tortured victim into a rebellious ringleader and then look for someone to blame elsewhere. To the rules, the emergency crew must have been the offenders since they took Przemyk to the EMS centre. Therefore, in 1984 they were found guilty and convicted in a fabricated trial. Few people believed in a version and course of events prepared under the supervision of the head of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, General Czesław Kiszczak, and proclaimed by Jerzy Urban, the propaganda mouthpiece of Jaruzelski's junta. However, this faked show trial and pressure ruined many people’s lives.

Five days after the death of the Warsaw high school graduate, his funeral took place in Warsaw, which became one of the largest demonstrations since the imposition of martial law. But, what was significant, the communists could not forbid this gathering and disperse the crowd.

On May 19, 1983, at the church of St. Stanisław Kostka in Warsaw's Żoliborz - the same place where the famous services with the participation of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko were held at that time - a crowd of several tens of thousands gathered together. Alongside his friends from the Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski High School, where Grzegorz Przemyk was about to graduate, young people and students from all over Warsaw came along. After the service, this vast crowd silently moved towards the Powązki Cemetery.

It was one of the most moving manifestations in the history of Warsaw. And it was a part of one of many national mourning mysteries. Because when Poles cannot manifest legally, they manifest during funerals. It was so during the times of the partitions of Poland, and it was also during the Polish People's Republic period. A year later, the church of St. Stanisław Kostka was a silent witness to another tragic story, the great funeral of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, murdered by employees of the Ministry of the Interior.

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  Grzegorz Przemyk was not the only such a young victim of the time. It can be assumed that the anti-communist attitude of the youth later forced the authorities to take a number of actions to activate various safety-valves, especially in areas such as pop culture and the sphere of customs. An institute was even established to study the problems of youth. Young people willingly engaged in demonstrations and various, often more daring actions. Hence, the Polish People's Republic authorities decided they should be distracted from this anti-establishment activity.

This is how people were killed during martial law

The youngest victim of the "Wujek" Coal Mine pacification was nineteen-year-old Andrzej Pełka. He was shot dead by a bullet which hit him straight into his head. The militia handed the corpse to the family with an order to bury it in the hometown of Niedośpielin - the Piotrków Region. Although two platoons of ZOMO soldiers, a company of the manoeuvring regiment and a large group of SB officers "watched over" the funeral, 150 people - residents of the village and the family of the murdered - took part in the last farewell to this young victim of martial law. Probably the bullet that fatally hit young Pełka was later one of those constituting evidence in the court case of killing the "Wujek" miners. Officially, during removal by the doctors, it was supposed to fall into the sewage system and disappear forever.

On December 17, 1981, twenty-year-old Antoni Browarczyk was returning home after his apprenticeship training in one of the Gdańsk workplaces. On his way, he came across a demonstration against martial law. He did not participate in it. However, when he arrived, the demonstrators tried to get to the Local Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party headquarters on Wały Jagiellońskie Street. Then the militia units fired shots. Two people were injured, and Antoni Borowczyk was fatally wounded. The family had problems with the funeral, the authorities made it difficult to release the corpse, and the death certificate provided a false date of death (December 23, 1981). Antoni Browarczyk's body was finally handed over to his relatives, and the funeral occurred on the last day of December 1981.

The youngest martial law victim was a Warsaw secondary school student Emil Barchański. This teenager - together with his peers, during martial law - organised a conspiracy modelled on that of the Home Army dating from World War II. These young people could communicate with each other only in a prearranged way; they did not know their real data, only nicknames. This secret organisation was called the Confederation of Polish Youth "Piłsudczycy". Emil was one of the initiators and participants of the bold action that took place on February 10, 1982, less than two months after the imposition of martial law. Several young people poured red paint over the monument of the communist criminal Felix Dzerzhinsky and then, throwing "Molotov cocktails", set fire to it. All of this happened in Warsaw on Felix Dzerzhinsky Square (now Bank Square/Plac Bankowy), just a few hundred meters away from the capital's militia headquarters in the Mostowski Palace.

At the beginning of March, Barchański was detained by the militia in a secret printing house. During the interrogations, he experienced cruel violence. He was then given a two-year suspended prison sentence. On May 17, 1982, during the trial of his colleagues, he recanted his earlier testimony. He stated that he had been tortured and declared he could recognise his oppressors. Emil Barchański was to testify further in court at the hearing in mid-June. However, that never happened. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances on June 3, 1982. Two days later, his body was fished out of the Vistula River. His death and subsequent investigation raise doubts to this day. Barchański avoided water and did not swim; according to his mother's account, during his holidays on the coast, he never entered the sea or went to the swimming pool. Therefore, he couldn’t have entered such dangerous water as the Vistula River voluntarily. At the time of his death, he was not even seventeen - the corpse was found the day before his birthday.

Cold-blooded communists

The first martial law victim in the town of Nowa Huta was a 22-year-old man, and just like Browarczyk, he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Andrzej Szewczyk - a worker, a graduate of the Mining Technical School in Krakow and a member of the Song and Dance Ensemble "Słowianki" - on the night of April 17/18, 1982, he was returning home after the curfew. Unfortunately, he came across a ZOMO patrol and was beaten unconscious by them. Found at dawn in the “Na Stoku” estate, at the taxi rank, he was still alive. Transported to a hospital, he died after 52 days - on June 8, 1983 - without regaining consciousness. His body was so mangled that the family could recognise him only by the birthmark on his arm. – I was fighting on the battlefield front, I received the Crux Virtuti Militari, and the last one I received was the one on my son's grave – his father said after the funeral.

The funeral of Bogdan Włosik in the autumn of 1982 in Nowa Huta became a vast demonstration condemning martial law. His death was highly provocative. Yet, initially - during the manifestation on October 13, 1982 - nothing foreshadowed this tragedy to come. Włosik even led the procession of many thousands of people, and after its end, he safely returned home, ate a meal and went to the Church of Our Lady Queen of Poland in Bieńczyce. In the first period, after the introduction of martial law, on the 13th day of each month, church services were held to pray for the homeland and victims of martial law. Around 6 p.m., an SB officer, Capt. Andrzej Augustyn pulled out a gun and shot the nearest person. He seemed to act with cold blood. The bullet fatally wounded the victim in the stomach. After the assassination, the killer calmly walked away to get into an unmarked police car. In the ambulance, Włosik whispered: "The communists killed me." At 8.15 pm, a student of an evening technical school and a worker of the Lenin Steelworks died on the operating table of a military hospital. His funeral occurred on October 20, 1982 and gathered a crowd of tens of thousands.

The death of Bogdan Włosik is often compared to the death of the most renowned victim of the shipyard protests in 1970. Zbyszek Godlewski is a symbol of all the victims of that fatal December; the famous "Ballad about Janek Wiśniewski" narrates his story. He was only 18 at the time of his death, and it was his body - placed on a door platform - that workers marched with through the streets of Gdynia. It was one of the most symbolic and moving manifestations in the history of Poland.

Buried at night with militiamen escort

In the enslaved Poland, funerals often became the only opportunity to manifest opposition on a mass scale. This was the case with the funerals of many famous people, but the burials of victims of the system had a particularly dramatic dimension. Already in the post-war 1940s, funerals of murdered activists of the Polish People's Party, led by Stanisław Mikołajczyk, were huge demonstrations. The communists had this awareness. Hence the secret burials of victims of communist crimes in the 1940s and 1950s.

While the authorities of that time organised a joint funeral for those who died during the demonstrations and strikes in June 1956 in Poznań, it was different in the case of funerals of the victims of December 1970. And these took place after the curfew hours, late in the evening and at night from 19 to 20 December (Saturday to Sunday) in almost all cemeteries in the Tri-City and Szczecin. The heads of the internal affairs departments of the Voivodeship National Councils supervised the funerals. All funerals followed a certain pattern. Officials from the WRN (Polish Socialist Party – Freedom, Equality, Independence) or MRN (Local National Council) came to the victims' homes late in the evening and informed the families that a funeral was about to take place. For many, it was the first time they learned about someone’s death. Relatives were transported to the cemetery with a militia escort. And if there were more than one family in the cemetery at the same time, they were isolated from each other. It was also forbidden to sing over the grave, but some people broke this ban.

Some of the families protested against such treatment. As a result of the protests in the case of the funeral of Zbigniew Nastały, instead of three people in one car, the authorities allowed nine people to go to the cemetery in two cars. This seventeen-year-old student of the shipyard trade school died on that December 17 morning near the SKM Gdynia Stocznia stop - just like Godlewski - from a shot straight in his forehead when militia and people's army units opened fire at labourers going to work. Buried in Gdańsk two months later - in February 1971 - he was exhumed and moved to the cemetery in his hometown of Wejherowo.

The hard-won compromise was achieved by the family of Stanisław Sieradzan, a student of the Refrigeration Technical College and a sailor. A bullet pierced his lungs during the suppression of protests in the streets of Gdynia. He was barely 18 years old. The family managed to move the funeral from December 19 to a day later. The Holy Mass preceded the funeral ceremony in a church, and the authorities transported nearly 50 participants to the cemetery by coach and minibuses. One thing was not abandoned in this case - the funeral had to occur after the curfew.

The funerals of those killed in the "Wujek" mine had similar proceedings, with the only difference that several victims were buried far from the Silesian region, in their home towns. But why was an open funeral organised for the victims from Poznań, but those killed in December 1970 were buried at night? Well, the bloody suppression of the Gdynia city demonstration of December 17, 1970 had a major impact on such behaviour of the authorities. Then the manifestation turned into a symbolic funeral procession carrying the dead shipyard worker on the door platform.

Even a stronger accent in history was made by the death of Stanisław Pyjas on May 7, 1977 in Krakow. Then, a 24-year-old opposition activist, a Polish philology and philosophy student at the Jagiellonian University, died in unexplained circumstances a few days before the Juwenalia annual students’ events. He was found dead in a tenement house at 7 Szewska Street. The authorities insisted that his death must have been caused by falling down the staircase.

The Pyjas’s death caused the so-called Black March and mass student demonstrations. In the evening of May 15, 1977, at the end of the manifestation, a declaration was read out in front of the Wawel Castle, establishing the Student Committee of Solidarity in Krakow - the first organisation of this kind in Eastern Europe - and calling for the disclosure of those responsible for crimes. Investigations conducted from the 1970s to the present day point to a fatal beating, most likely by SB officers who were reported on Pyjas by his colleague and later SKS activist, Lesław Maleszka. However, the matter is still not fully clarified.

It is also worth recalling two other very similar funerals, although they were separated by over 40 years. One from the beginning of the Polish People's Republic era and one from its end.

Maria Tyrankiewiczówna, a student at the University of Lodz (Uniwersytet Łódzki), was murdered on December 14, 1945. All the Łódź city residents pointed to the Red Army soldiers as the perpetrators of the crime. The funeral was organised by students from “Bratnia Pomoc”, to whom the militia did not want to release the body from the mortuary. Two thousand students gathered in front of the morgue and forced the functionaries to release the corpse. “A spontaneously formed procession began to move silently along the city’s main streets. In complete silence, students carried on their shoulders a white coffin with the corpse of a friend. On the way to the Church of Our Lady in Nowe Miasto, they borrowed a mourning cross and two black banners. And so (...) they reached the academic church,” – wrote Father Tomasz Rostworowski. The next morning, after the service, the 6,000-strong procession set off, but not along the side alley routes, as ordered by the authorities, but along the main streets of Łódź. Before entering the cemetery, a military cordon separated the head of the procession with the coffin and wreaths from the rest of the crowd.

It was only after the funeral that serious events took place. Windows in the editorial office of "Robotnik" were broken, and young people returning from the funeral sang "Rota" with changed words: "... until the Soviet turmoil disintegrates into ashes and dust." At night, the UB functionaries (the Office of State Security) arrested about 1,500 people, mostly young ones. The press wrote about the students as those who wanted to bring "the worst habits of the so-called golden youth, i.e. a razor blade, a club, knuckledusters", and the funeral of this young student was used for "brawling purposes". In connection with this event, an imminent "expulsion of the young masters" was announced.

Many years later, on November 2, 1986, after 13 days of fighting for his life in rather mysterious circumstances (it was suspected that he had been beaten by the militia), a student of the University of Gdańsk Marcin Antonowicz died in one of the Olsztyn hospitals. The authorities expected the funeral to be attended by a large number of people and tried to force the family to hold it 5 kilometres away, outside of the city. This failed, but the obituaries published by the local press did not mention the date and time of the ceremony.

The burial drew a ten thousand crowd anyway. There were students from Gdańsk, academic chaplains from the Tri-City and Olsztyn, and even two bishops arrived. ABC and NBC American TV stations filmed the funeral ceremonies. The authorities placed 15 city buses in front of the church, which really surprised the funeral participants. However, the Gdańsk students, after leaving the church service, took the coffin over their shoulders and went down with it to the cemetery. Above the grave, a letter from Lech Wałęsa was read out. He could not come along to the funeral because the prosecutor's office did not allow him to leave Gdańsk due to the ongoing investigation against him. The chairman of Solidarity wrote: “This death is completely absurd. It touched the late Marcin when he was at the hands of those whose elementary duty was to protect the safety of citizens. Once again, it has been confirmed that the functionaries of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Poland operate above the law and with a sense of complete impunity.”

The sad point of all these stories is that, despite the system’s collapse, the perpetrators of communist crimes remained largely unpunished. Third Polish Republic was unable to hold them accountable. And if it had happened, it would have been far from satisfactory.

-Grzegorz Sieczkowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

–Translated by Katarzyna Chocian