The Charge d’affaires of Poland in Belarus, Marcin Wojciechowski, laid flowers and lit candles at the graves of Home Army soldiers in Mikuliszki cemetery which had been barbarously razed to the ground. “Polish national memorials in Belarus will not be forgotten. Glory to the Heroes!”, wrote the Polish embassy in Minsk.

In Mikuliszki in the Oshmyany region in the north-east of the Grodno region, Belarusian authorities razed with heavy machines the tombs of the soldiers of the Third and Sixth Brigades of the Home Army who died in 1944. None of the 22 crosses erected at this memorial site remains.

In these tombs, soldiers of the Home Army were buried at various times in 1944, both before and after the operation code-named “Ostra Brama”, which was carried out by Home Army units on 7-15 July to recapture Vilnius from German hands.

On 5 July 2022, the chargé d’affaires of Belarus was summoned to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where a stern protest was handed over in connection with the destruction of the AK soldiers’ cemetery in Mikuliszki.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also issued a statement saying that ‘this exceptionally shameful event is an example of the current Belarusian authorities’ violation of all its obligations regarding memorials on its territory.

“It is reminiscent of the darkest pages of the history of communism, and in view of earlier reports of the devastation of Polish war graves, it cannot be perceived in any other way than as a deliberate action to further degrade mutual relations between Poland and Belarus”, says the Polish MFA.

It is also said that “the liquidation of Polish graves and memorial sites is another and most emphatic example of the Minsk regime’s actions against Poles in Belarus”.

The Foreign Ministry condemned the anti-Polish campaign by the Belarusian authorities to erase traces of Polishness in Belarus.

Adrian Andrzejewski