STARE CZARNOWO, Poland — Poles and Germans set aside old rancor today and united in grief as they reburied the bones of 2,116 people believed to be German civilians killed in the final, vicious months of World War II.
Wooden coffins — 119 of them, each topped with white carnations and containing the remains of more than a dozen people — were laid out side-by-side in a vast grave at a German war cemetery in Stare Czarnowo, a Polish village near the border with Germany.
Religious leaders blessed the remains and mourners tossed red roses onto the coffins as the service drew to a close.
“We have gathered here to properly bury and pay respect to the World War II victims,” Bishop Marian Kruszylowicz, a Roman Catholic leader from the nearby city of Szczecin, said during a 90-minute ceremony held in German and Polish. “We owe them that.”
About 300 people attended, most of them Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II when Europe’s borders were redrawn. German Ambassador Michael H. Gerdts and city officials from Malbork, where the remains were found, also attended.
On Sept. 1, German Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to attend ceremonies in Poland marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the war, which began with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Forensic experts and anthropologists believe the victims are most probably German civilians who died in early 1945 in Malbork, at the time the German city of Marienburg. However, no documents, clothes or personal belongings were found with them except for a pair of children’s glasses.
“What is most painful about these victims is that there is nothing to give them any identity,” said Sibylle Greher, a member of a group that represents Germans expelled from Eastern Europe. “And that suggests that something really terrible must have happened to them. It shows the hatred at the end of the war in that region.”
The first bones were found in October by construction workers digging foundations for a five-star hotel by the red brick medieval Malbork Castle, a tourist attraction and UNESCO World Heritage site. It took three months for the magnitude of the grave to become clear. While construction of the 175-room hotel was moved to an adjacent plot, an exhumation was ordered by Polish authorities.
Workers spent six months gently working through wet sand to amass the bones of the more than 2,000 men, women and children. But the lack of objects found with them mean that the uncertainty about who the dead were and who killed them may never be resolved. There also are no known witnesses to the first burial, in 1945.
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