Burial at Osobowice Cemetery

On Wednesday, 21 October 2026, 49 soldiers and activists of the Polish independence underground were laid to rest at Osobowice Cemetery in Wrocław. All of them were victims of the communist regime. The ceremony opened with a Mass in the cemetery chapel, and President Karol Nawrocki took part alongside state and military officials, representatives of the IPN and relatives of the dead. The burials took place in a section the sources call the Kwatera Żołnierzy Niezłomnych. The funeral closes a multi-stage research and exhumation project run by the IPN together with the city of Wrocław and the Lower Silesian Voivodeship Office.

The former prison burial fields

The remains were held in former prison burial fields, numbered 81A and 120, within the cemetery. Between 1948 and 1956 the security apparatus secretly buried there the bodies of political prisoners who had been executed or tortured in Prison No. 1 on Kleczkowska Street, as well as people who died in Prison No. 2 on Sądowa Street. Exhumations from the two fields were carried out in 2024-2026, in front of a monument to the Victims of Communist Terror 1945-1956. The funeral continues the IPN's work to put the site in order, examine it and commemorate it properly.

What the president said

Speaking at the ceremony, Nawrocki described the 49 dead as both victims and heroes of the struggle for freedom, sovereignty and independence. He said the communist system is responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 million people worldwide, and that it remains dangerous because it adapts to new challenges while its evil content stays the same. He told the mourners that the system never stops at killing its victims.

“The communist system never sates itself only with the death of its victims, but does everything to destroy the graves.”

Nawrocki also set the tone of the day by stressing the purpose of the gathering.

“We are meeting here, above all, to pay tribute to our national heroes and bow our heads before their beautiful life stories.”

Soldiers who fought on after 1945

Nawrocki said many of the dead had served in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne), the National Military Union and the Secret Polish Army, as well as other independence organisations. He argued that after 1945 these soldiers stayed in the same war that began in 1939, remaining loyal to their oath and fighting for a free, independent and sovereign Poland. He said that 1945 brought only the exchange of one occupation for another. The president recalled Colonel Łukasz Ciepliński, known as 'Pług', who wrote from his death cell asking whether the sacrifice of the victims would be in vain and answering that it would not.

“I think each of these 49 victims thought the same as Łukasz Ciepliński 'Pług', that this death will not go to waste.”

The words were central to the ceremony, which the president presented as a duty to remember as well as to mourn.

Key dates

The sequence runs from the war that began in 1939 through the secret burials of 1948 to 1956 and the exhumations of 2024 to 2026, ending with the funeral on 21 October 2026.