Home » World » Horror in an enchanted forest: the appalling story of the 800 children massacred by the Nazis in Tarnow

Horror in an enchanted forest: the appalling story of the 800 children massacred by the Nazis in Tarnow

Tarnow lived the war from the beginning. Within a week of the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 8, 1939, German forces entered the city, located some seventy kilometers from Krakow. The subjugation was immediate. There were no good ways. Just cruelty and brutality.

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The first to be persecuted were the Jews. They displaced them from their homes, stole their belongings. Soon they established a ghetto. They had to leave their homes, collect what they could take with them, and settle in the place that the Nazis determined. The transfers to the different concentration camps soon began.. However, the ghetto population was increasing. There came to be 40 thousand Jews who were brought from different parts of the Polish territory.

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On June 14, 1940, he reached Auschwitz the first train with Polish prisoners. There were just under eight hundred who had been dispatched from Tarnow.

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Near Tarnow, a few kilometers, less than seven, a small town. Quiet and slow. A complicated name to spell and even more difficult to pronounce: Zbylitowska Gora. So far from the world was he, so little attentive to the news and technological advances, that it seemed that reality was never going to knock on the doors of the town. The greatest pride was a natural wonder where it seemed that only beauty and peace could enter. Buczyna Forest. However It was the most unthinkable of the atrocious scenario.

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Buczyna, a silent forest of unusual beauty, hides a bleak, heart-breaking story. Tall, strong, majestic trees. The elegance of the fallen leaves with harmonious disorder on the grass, the faint colored flowers decorate the closed forest, the birds let their song be heard in there, in that dreamy place, the spirit freezes. The air is thick and the atmosphere of pain prevails. Horror is in the air.

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Tarnow was a small Polish city with a calm daily life, a provincial life. Its inhabitants laughed, cried, worked, had fun. They fell in love, they quarreled. Each one had his trade. There were tailors, watchmakers, shoemakers, doctors, police, artists, and lawyers. But the rhythm and history of the city changed, like everything else, when World War II went through them.

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Nothing would ever be the same again. The German invasion was felt with the persecution of the Jews. The order was the same as always, the Nazi method: first the seclusion in a ghetto; then the Final solution.

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About 10,000 Tarnow people were massacred: more than 6,000 Jews and about 2,000 Catholic Poles. In June 1942 the peak of alienation and barbarism occurred.

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The inhabitants of the Tarnow Ghetto were forced to go to the main square with their belongings. They were divided into two categories. The A class they were considered fit for work. The Class B they couldn’t work. That night a violent raid that covered every square meter of the ghetto. Those who had the B on their documents or had no papers on them were deported to Belzec, an extermination camp. But many did not even get on the train. They were killed on that barbaric night.

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With each passing day of life in the Tarnow Ghetto, she grew more inhuman. Overcrowding, shortages, hunger, lack of water and hygiene, diseases that settled and undermined the population. But the Nazis didn’t think it was enough.

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Thousands of inhabitants of Tarnow were cut down about 10 kilometers from their village, in the serene Buczyna forest, in Zbylitowska Gora. There, among the immense trees several centuries old, the massacre took place. The executions were carried out with sadistic and persistent constancy.

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Bodies piled on top of each other. A mountain of corpses in which it was impossible to determine where one began and where another ended. Some Poles achieved a short survival by digging the graves in which they would be hidden (that was the purpose: to hide them, not give them a decent burial).

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The Nazi soldiers were presented with another problem that they had not calculated but would solve with similar cruelty. The young children of these fathers and mothers annihilated they had been deposited in a small house, with just two rooms, in which in one of their typical euphemisms the Nazis had baptized orphanage.

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Under the care of no one, separated from their parents forever, the boys –there were babies and the oldest were barely 8 years old– Overcrowded, without food, without drinks, without the least hygienic conditions, they stayed several days without anyone paying too much attention to them.

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The boys, locked up, walked among their own excrement, hungry; the crying and screaming were heartbreaking. The situation became unbearable. The decision was not long in coming. Those children would be massacred.

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About 800 were transported to the forest of Zbylitowska Gora and shot in the midst of tears, screams and despair. There can be nothing that comes closer to a Dantesque scene than that. Then they were deposited in the graves dug in the middle of the forest.

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August Hafner, Nazi commander present at the site, some years after the massacre, said: “The children were being brought into the forest in a tractor. They were forcibly taken down, lined up, and then shot in the neck. They were falling one by one into the pit. The sounds were indescribable: I will never forget those scenes for the rest of my life, it is very hard to live with it. I especially remember a little red-haired girl who grabbed my hand as she walked past me. She was also executed. ” This could be considered the Nazi version, a version even pious. Little did some historians claim that the children were thrown into the graves alive and then the soldiers threw grenades into them.

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Today, after crossing narrow and winding roads, one enters the forest. The graves are housed in the midst of towering trees.

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In the middle of the property is a monument with steps that lead to a tall and narrow construction that remembers and honors the victims who lie there.

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From the monument derive some trails that run a couple of slopes and lead to the graves. Some are surrounded by blue and others with white fences. The former correspond to Jews. White to Poles. But there is one more that is overflowing with drawings, toys, candles and photos. It is the grave of the children massacred by the Nazis.

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The climate of anguish, recollection and perpetual pain that crosses this forest is difficult to transmit. Silence prevails. Silence cries out for justice. That silence screams permanently, in a scream that never fades, that don’t forget those guys. Let that memory be the one that prevents barbarism from happening again.

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