Nine Poles charged with war crimes were sentenced to death this past week, and a tenth to 15 years imprisonment, by various Polish courts. The specific charge was turning Jews over to the occupying Nazi authorities, who murdered them, or committing the executions themselves.
Two of the nine were sentenced by a court at Rseszow, the remainder were condemned in Warsaw. One was a former Gestapo member and guard at the Oswiecim concentration camp. Among the condemned men was a former chief of the German military police at Siedlice and Gora Kalwaria, seat of the famous Gora Rabbis of the Chassidic sect.
Tombstones and memorial tablets have been erected in Jewish cemeteries in Czestochowa and Plock over the mass graves of thousands of victims of the Nazis.
In Plock, the first city in Poland in which Jews settled, in 1,237 C.E., the monument marked the grave of 9,000 Jews. In Czestochowa, three tombstones were placed over a maze grave of 4,000 men, women and children murdered in the liquidation of the local ghetto during the Nazi occupation.
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