Soviet Crimes Research Articles

Wspomnienia polskiej uczennicy zesłanej w okresie powojennym na Syberię w perspektywie dokumentów

Background: The article aims to present the fate of children sent with their families to the Soviet Union in the post-war years, preserved in the memory and private collections of Janina Góral (de domo Nesterowicz). The interview touches on such topics as Soviet crimes, conditions in Siberia, the denationalization of Polish children, the struggle against religion, rape – including an example of a mass rape whose victims and perpetrator are still alive – and attempts to cope with inhuman realities. The collected materials also describe the reality of Soviet school, daily and family life of exiled Poles in Siberia. Objectives: Initially, the recording of Janina Góral’s testimony by a team of volunteers from the group Niezapomniani – Inicjatywa Brzeskiej Młodzieży Patriotycznej within the framework of the Kotwica Pokoleń project was aimed at popularizing the history of Brzeg witnesses to history. With the deepening of the research, it became a priority to compile the collected materials into one coherent narrative, which will help answer the question about the course of the deportation of the person reporting and the brutal reality she faced at that time in school and beyond. Methods: The main tool used in the research is oral history, recorded as part of the Kotwica Pokoleń project. The primary source critique was done on the basis of sources, from the private collections of the person who gave his account. These included school certificates, personnel files, schoolgirl characteristics, and documents related to the repatriation, delivery duty and work of Michal Nesterowicz, Janina’s father. Criticism was also extended to Russian and Polish literature related to the issue under study. Results: With the help of the research, the exact history of Janina Góral’s education from grades 4 to 9 was determined, the overwhelming majority of which took place in Siberia near the town of Zima. In addition to determining the living conditions and the course of the deportation, attention was paid to the various forms of oppression and dangers faced by Polish children. Conclusions: The research showed the inconsistency of Janina Góral’s account with the documentation. They also revealed the communist school system in Siberia in light of the experiences of the Polish schoolgirl, and expanded knowledge of life in forced settlements in the Soviet Union in the Irkutsk region. In addition, they revealed the crime of gang rape that occurred against two exiled Polish women and a Ukrainian woman. They also demonstrated the value of combining research conducted by the oral history method with private collections. In addition, they draw attention to the trauma that war and captivity leave in a person.

From state terror to international conflict. A place of memory: Katyn as a foreign policy tool of Putin’s Russia

This text discusses the transformations of the Katyn memorial site near Smolensk in western Russia, where, in 1940, the mass murder of more than 4,000 Polish military officers who were prisoners of war occurred. After the Soviet Union’s admission of guilt in 1990, it seemed for two decades that Katyn could also serve as a place for mutual reconciliation between post-communist Poland and post-Soviet Russia. However, in the period of increasing tension between Russia and Poland after 2010, the monument in Katyn became an object of Russian–Polish confrontation. The author concludes that the Katyn memorial complex today illustrates the tendency to patriotize and detraumatize Soviet crimes, whereby the positive events of the Soviet era – especially the victory over Germany in World War II – are ‘Russified’ and newly politically traumatized in parallel with the trivialization and marginalization of murder and crimes against human rights. The new form of memory in Katyn reflects an increasingly firmly dictated line from above that combines Russian nationalism, Orthodox faith, and a sentimental view of the period of Communist rule.

Mnemonic Conflicts and Cooperation in Memory Politics: Development of Narratives about Historical Traumas in Lithuania after 1991

This article is focused on the most visible narratives about Lithuania’s trauma experiences—deportations under Stalin, the anti-Soviet partisan war and the Holocaust. These hegemonic traumatic experiences were essential for the processes of Lithuanian statehood since 1991. ‘Separate memories’ about the Soviet crimes, associated with the deportations under Stalin and anti-Soviet partisan war, and the Holocaust, were developed in Lithuania. Even though these memories are associated with separate memory regimes, they intersect and often conflict with each other. How were memory regimes, associated with these hegemonic memories, develop? Which actors affected the development of these regimes in separate trajectories? How did these memory regimes get into conflict, and what were the consequences of these conflicts? Is multidirectional memory, when different traumatic experiences ‘talk’ to each other, possible in Lithuania? The goal of the article is to survey the dominant memory regimes in Lithuania and assess their influence on the development of the Lithuanian statehood. The main research findings highlight the importance of geopolitical developments and international actors for the processes of mnemonic conflicts and mnemonic cooperation locally. In the case of Lithuania, major geopolitical developments coincided with the creation of major trauma narratives. The participation of international actors in the creation of major trauma narratives has resulted in both mnemonic conflicts and mnemonic cooperation.

The Transformation of Lithuanian Memories of Soviet Crimes to Genocide Recognition

ABSTRACT∞ This article examines the transformation of memory regarding Soviet crimes in Lithuania, and more broadly in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, as an interlinked political and legal process. In the Lithuanian context, this transformation was part of a transitional justice effort that resulted in the recovery of European identity and international legal recognition of Soviet genocide against Lithuanian partisans by the European Court of Human Rights.

Wybrane przykłady szpiegostwa sowieckiego i działalności antypaństwowej na terenach Okręgu Korpusu nr V Kraków w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym

The article attempts to present and analyze examples of espionage and anti-state activities, inspired by the services of the USSR and illegal communist environments. The area of their activity was limited to the territory of the District Command No. V Kraków, i.e. the provinces of Kraków, Silesia and parts of Kielce one, which also were under the supervision of the Independent Information Office, that was part of its structure. It was its duties that included regular inspections in garrisons or military units, observations of people suspected of espionage and, finally, liquidation of scandals with help of its own agent apparatus, police or gendarmerie. The article focuses on the efforts of Polish secret services and the security authorities cooperating with them in combating secret Soviet crime against the Republic of Poland.

Niemiecka Republika Federalna jako azyl dla nazistowskich zbrodniarzy wojennych. Analiza wybranych aspektów ścigania i skuteczności karania

West Germany had to come to terms with its wartime past in order to function on the international arena. This topic was also widely commented on in Polish press. Poland, which was one of the countries most affected by the extermination policy of Nazi Germany, was inevitably interested in holding the Nazis accountable for their crimes. Moreover, the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland wanted German crimes to be exposed all the time. In this way, the topic of Soviet crimes was avoided. Hence, the theme of punishment for Nazi war crimes was often discussed in the press. Many articles emphasised the pathological system of prosecuting the Nazis in West Germany, pointing to the post-war careers of the war criminals. Reluctance to face the past, exhibited primarily by the older generation, was also emphasised. The young generation of Germans, untouched by the war past, was to strive for moral renewal. It should be stressed that the post-war trials concerned only a small number of actual criminals, and the penalties were often disproportionate to the crimes committed.

Love and Other Legacies in Soviet Crime and Punishment

Love and Other Legacies in Soviet Crime and Punishment Rhiannon Dowling (bio) Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag. 328 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0300179415. $65.00. Jonathan Daly, Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin. 258 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. ISBN-13 978-1474224369. $88.00. Arsenii Formakov, Gulag Letters, ed. and trans. Emily D. Johnson. 304 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0300209310. $85.00. Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev's Soviet Union, 1953–1964. 280 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-1501702792. $45.00. Ever since I got into contact with you, I have been in a remarkably serene, tranquil, cheerful mood. I am more good-humored than I have ever been ... I pay absolutely no heed to all the surrounding trivialities and rubbish. Physically I now feel my condition is completely satisfactory: recently we had our latest quarterly medical inspection, and they found absolutely nothing wrong with my health (except for my heart, but whose heart is in good shape nowadays?) —Arsenii Formakov (1900–83) to his wife, 1 January 1945 (Gulag Letters, 87–88) Arsenii Formakov was most definitely lying. At least he was not telling the whole truth. When he finally got in touch with his wife, Anna, Formakov had been incarcerated for three and a half years. Most of this time he spent in the Kraslag labor camp in Krasnoiarsk krai, over 5,000 kilometers from where he [End Page 173] was arrested in his home of Daugavpils, Latvia. He was a prominent member of a community of Latvian Old Believers arrested for anti-Soviet activity after the Soviet army occupied and annexed Latvia in 1940. His correspondences with Anna and other close friends and family members from 1944–55 are translated and interpreted by Emily Johnson in the absorbing new volume Gulag Letters. In them, he boasted of the simple comforts he enjoyed in the camp, as well as the tremendous good fortune and privilege that insulated him from the horrors that Anna no doubt imagined he suffered as a forced laborer. He continued this way until his release in 1947. His actions, however, belied his cheerful words. When he was rearrested 19 months after release, he tried to commit suicide by slitting his wrists in his isolation cell. After his release from his second sentence in 1955 thanks to reforms that eliminated the most brutal camps and practices, his health never fully recovered, although he lived a long and full life. Both his religious faith and his relationship with Anna remained strong, and the two lived together until their deaths in 1983 and 1985 (9, 47, 89, 149, 261). Over half a century since the first stories from the Stalinist Gulag became available to readers worldwide, historians still disagree about how to comprehend this institution and how to use the testimonies of its victims. Memoir literature from writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, and Gustaw Herling has made the most profound impressions on a wide range of readers, detailing depths of deprivation and inhumanity inflicted on prisoners by feckless guards, senseless regulations, and vicious fellow-prisoners.1 Since then, the fall of the Soviet Union has opened archives containing official records from the Soviet justice system and a flood of memoir literature has brought new survivors into the discussion.2 Historians have since drawn from both the official records and the testimonies of survivors to produce a more complex picture of the world of the Stalinist Gulag. In recent decades, [End Page 174] scholars like Oleg Khlevniuk, Galina Ivanova, and Anne Applebaum have used a variety of official documents and survivor literature to develop a broad overview of the Gulag system's functioning. They all emphasized the repressive and economic functions of the institution, portraying the Gulag as an integral part of Stalin's regime of societal control and echoing insights that Solzhenitsyn offered in his Gulag Archipelago.3 The picture of oppressive centralized control has been complicated by studies like those of Alan Barenberg and Steven...

Judgment in Moscow: Soviet crimes and western complicity

Judgment in Moscow: Soviet crimes and western complicity

HERTA MÜLLER, OSKAR PASTIOR, AND ATEMSCHAUKEL AS POETIC ASSEMBLAGE

AbstractThis study explores Herta Müller's engagement with the poet Oskar Pastior's life and work in her novel Atemschaukel (2009). The novel is largely based on Pastior's experience as one among the thousands of Romanian‐Germans deported to Gulags in 1945, and the poet worked with Müller both as a source and a literary collaborator before his death. Müller does not directly reproduce Pastior's poetics or his experience in her novel, but she engages with both using dynamic, paratactical structures reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of ‘assemblage’. Müller's interaction with Pastior benefits from an overlap between their poetic concerns: both writers’ oeuvres are marked by traumatic experiences of totalitarianism, and by a desire to undermine the master‐narratives of ideology. In Atemschaukel their poetics become entangled, evoking both resistance to totalitarian structures, and the trauma these same structures inflict. The dynamic poetic forms Müller uses to engage with Pastior also help her to negotiate a fraught memory space that not only includes Soviet crimes, but is also overshadowed by Nazi atrocity. Through the use of paratactical poetic motifs Müller acknowledges the presence of multiple painful historical currents, without shaping them into an undifferentiated whole.

Major Zygmunt Kunisz – artylerzysta zamordowany w Charkowie (1894–1940)

<p>Artykuł opisuje życie majora Zygmunta Kunisza – jednej z ofiar zbrodni sowieckiej z 1940 r. Był on oficerem artylerii między innymi pociągach pancernych w czasie wojny polskobolszewickiej, a po jej zakończeniu służył w 22 i 28 pułku artylerii lekkiej, zaś od 1935 r. kwatermistrzem w 4 pułku artylerii ciężkiej. We wrześniu 1939 r. objął dowództwo nowo sformowanego I dywizjonu tego pułku, którym dowodził w trakcie kampanii wrześniowej. Po agresji sowieckiej na Polskę – major Zygmunt Kunisz dostał się w bliżej nieznanych okolicznościach do niewoli sowieckiej. Przez kilka miesięcy przebywał w obozie jenieckim w Starobielsku, po czym w kwietniu 1940 r. został zamordowany w więzieniu w Charkowie. Postać tego oficera była w polskiej literaturze często mylona w odniesieniu do kampanii wrześniowej 1939 roku z jego młodszym bratem Tadeuszem – także oficerem artylerii w stopniu majora. Tekst został oparty w głównej mierze na dokumentach archiwalnych oraz wspomnieniach i materiałach przekazanych przez Marię Kunisz – wnuczkę Stanisława Kunisza, starszego brata Zygmunta. Artykuł ten ma na celu wyjaśnić istniejące nadal rozbieżności i błędne informacje na temat majora Zygmunta Kunisza, awansowanego w pośmiertnie w 2007 r. na stopień podpułkownika.</p>

Vasutasok és a szovjet megszállók

At the end of World War 2, it took more than a half year for the Red Army to occupy Hungary. Following the negotiations in Tehran and Yalta, Hungary joined the socialist camp led by Moscow. Therefore, thousands of cases of pillage, rape and murder committed by Soviet soldiers could not be articulated in the official historiography, Russian troops could only be mentioned in a positive context within any publication. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the above-mentioned policy on historiography changed, and several books, articles and reminiscences were published on the Soviet crimes against the population. The aim of this study is present the types of connection between the Russian soldiers and the railwaymen from the beginning of the occupation to the end of the monetary stabilization in 1946. In the first half of the 20th century, the railway was the backbone of Hungary’s economy. Without the railway – due to the lack of roads and automobiles – the economic system would have totally collapsed. The Russians were aware of the importance of the railway, hence as the front moved on, they ordered the citizens and railwaymen to reconstruct the railway tracks as fast as they could. To achieve a complex picture on the connection between soldiers and railwaymen, we need to focus on not only the negative, but the positive cases as well.

Remembrance and education about the Holocaust and Gulag crimes at selected museums and memorial sites in the context of learning from the past and human rights education

REMEMBRANCE AND EDUCATION ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST AND GULAG CRIMES IN SELECTED MUSEUMS AND MEMORIAL SITES IN THE CONTEXT OF LEARNING FROM THE PAST AND HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATIONDiff erent historical narratives and collective memories linked to the constructions of national identity still divide Western and Central-Eastern Europe. The framework of Human Rights Education addressing universality and interdependence of Human Rights may have a potential to overcome divisions connected with national approaches to history. They may connect young people to “negative” memory and shameful, hidden, distorted historical narratives of the past of their own countries. The attitude of European societies towards the Holocaust is one of the themes still not included in many curricula. The history of the Holocaust and Soviet crimes in many countries still waits for contextual approaches. Museums and memorial sites in this context are carriers of memory of wars, genocides, slavery, totalitarian regimes, crimes against humanity, mass atrocities and memories of their victims. They are also signifi cant agents of historical socialisation. History education at memorial sites is a form of historical education based not on teaching about but rather on learning through the past. The text deals with empirical studies focused on education at museums and memorial sites and will explore issues related to education about the Holocaust and Gulag in selected case studies.

Wajda i krzyż

WAJDA AND THE CROSSAmong literary, social, historical or political inspirations of Andrzej Wajda’s movies, it’s necessary to consider religious motifs and symbols present in his films. The article proposes a review of three films: Ashes and Diamonds Popiół i diament, Pilate and Others Piłat i inni and Katyn Katyń, to emphasize a particular role of the cross. In the opening scene of Ashes and Diamonds three crosses indicate a possible salvation for the protagonists, who however remain blind to it. Pilate and Others, a biblical apocryphal film, reveals indifference of contemporaries and a lay society to Jesus, to his sufferance and his Cross. Katyn, a historical drama, is about searching for the truth about Soviet crime against Polish officers in 1940, hidden during decennia. Its symbol is an empty Cross and a crucifix, covered with a military mantle. Andrzej Wajda used consciously these symbols both to show the importance of the Christianity and its values and to show with empathy human disinterest with it. Several religious or biblical symbols can be also identified in other movies Speed; Samson; Korczak; Holy Week.

Post-communist invocation of Europe: memorial museums’ narratives and the Europeanization of memory

ABSTRACTHow do post-communist memorial museums in East-Central Europe tell stories about double occupation (by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union), collaboration, the Holocaust and victim narratives, and how have these narratives been influenced by accession to the European Union? How do the museums reference trends set by Holocaust memorial museums? The article shows that one group of museums invokes Europe and the Europeanization of the Holocaust. Other museums seek to contain certain aspects of the memory of Nazism so that it cannot compete with stories of Soviet crimes. Both incorporate elements from Holocaust memorial museums, indicating how universalized Holocaust remembrance is.

Is Eastern European ‘Double Genocide’ Revisionism Reaching Museums?

In contrast to twentieth-century Holocaust Denial, the most recent assault on the narrative of the genocide of European Jewry has emanated from a sophisticated revisionist model known as Double Genocide, codified in the 2008 Prague Declaration. Positing ‘equality' of Nazi and Soviet crimes, the paradigm’s corollaries sometimes include attempts to rehabilitate perpetrators and discredit survivors. Emanating from pro-Western governments and elites in Eastern Europe in countries with records of high collaboration, the movement has reached out widely to the Holocaust Studies establishment as well as Jewish institutions. It occasionally enjoys the political support of major Western countries in the context of East-West politics, or in the case of Israel, attempts to garner (eastern) European Union support. The empirical effects to date have included demonstrable impact on museums, memorials and exhibits in Eastern Europe and beyond.

The Tragedy of the Holocaust in Lithuania: from the Roots of the Identity to the Efforts Towards Reconciliation

The relationship of each State with the Holocaust is twofold. Each self-respecting and democratic State, which recognizes international human rights, makes all efforts that this painful period of history is known to the public and to future generations. Secondly, the perception of the holocaust directly depends on the individual relationship each society has with the tragedy of the criminal act. This means that education about the Holocaust should go beyond the simple integration of specific programmes into the system of a state education, but the success of such programmes is dependent on the fact of how the society in question treats the historical, political, social and legal context of the holocaust. No less important is an evaluation of the impact which the holocaust makes to the development of society and the state. It is established fact that, after the Nazi occupation, not only Germans but also native Lithuanians participated in the actions of the Holocaust. It is important that the collective memory about ethnical, religious and racial conflicts, touching the collective identity, honour, liability and unfairness, is transferred from generation to generation. It is necessary to understand the circumstances and causes which influenced or are still impacting the understanding of the holocaust tragedy with regard to the whole society or to the specific perception by separate individuals. Taking into account the mentioned circumstances, several main aspects which define the relationship of Lithuanian society with the holocaust are revealed. The first issue discussed in the article is the Jewish-Lithuanian relations until the Holocaust, as in many cases stereotypes about Jews which developed during that period continue to affect the understanding of the holocaust tragedy to this day. A second important factor discussed in the paper - that the holocaust did not involve just a tragedy of society or state, but it is also a personal drama of each individual who was involved in the atrocities of the holocaust, especially when it comes to collective responsibility. Moreover, the question of liability is complicated by the fact that at the time of the holocaust the surviving members of Lithuania's Jewish community, who had played an active and important part in Lithuanian society and who were almost exterminated, emigrated. Because of Soviet policies, the survivors who stayed in Lithuania were forced to deny their identity. After all, the holocaust is the field of various legal evaluations and interests. Contrary to the situation in Western Europe, in Lithuania like in other post-communist countries, the holocaust is treated not as some unique event, having no analogue phenomena, but is viewed together with the atrocities of the Soviet occupation. It follows that a pure and appropriate analysis regarding changes of the legal situation in Lithuania’s understanding of the Holocaust in the light of Soviet crimes should be carried out. It must be stated, that the authors of the article do not pretend to be analyzing the methods or the scale of Lithuanians’ participation in the Jewish genocide, or to be providing arguments to deny or justify their behavior. This article is an effort towards a better understanding of how the process of reconciliation between two nations (Lithuania and Israel) is influenced by specific historical and political conditions. It should be noted that the authors do not discuss and evaluate the scale of forced deportations in other countries as the main issue of the article is to find out the Lithuanian attitude to the matter. Keywords: holocaust in Lithuania, Jewish identity, Nazi and Soviet crimes

Veterans’ Memoirs as a Source for the USSR’s Intervention in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Fluctuations in Their Appearance and Character With Political Change in Post-Soviet Russia

ABSTRACTShortly before and after the USSR’s demise, a new literature emerged: memoirs by veterans of the Soviet Union’s massive military intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1960s and ’70s. Resurgent Russian pride, coupled with condemnation of its corruption by Soviet crimes, permitted startling disclosures. Tools we developed to evaluate these sources found them remarkably reliable and necessitated a reassessment of existing historiography. The Putin administration marked a reversal. Russian nationalism now stressed continuity with the USSR’s great-power status. ‘Falsification of history against Russian interests’ was criminalized. Some veterans resorted to purported ‘fiction’, which if challenged could be disclaimed. But under even stricter scrutiny, these narratives generally proved to reflect the authors’ actual experience, providing significant pointers for further research.

Triumphant memory of the perpetrators: Putin's politics of re-Stalinization

In this article, I explore the interconnection between Putin's politics of re-Stalinization, historical memory, and a specific version of the post-Soviet neo-medievalism. I show that re-Stalinization is a mass movement that is grounded in the unprocessed memory of Soviet crimes and atrocities. The popular myth of the “Great Patriotic War” and the myth of Stalinism as the Golden Age exploited by Putin's memory politics became a gold mine for Putin's kleptocracy. I argue that re-Stalinization and the Kremlin-sponsored ideology of Eurasianism represents two interrelated trends of a complex ideological process. Eurasianism combines Soviet denial of individuality with the idea of a state-dependent patriarchal society and Russian historical messianism. It glorifies the reign of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. The ‘medievalist’ discourse of Eurasian ideologists, which advocates a return to the medieval society of orders, on the one hand, and the Gothic monsters populating post-Soviet film and fiction, on the other, creates a political language that expresses new attitudes to people in post-Soviet Russia. They depict a new social contract that reconsiders the modern concept of citizenship, and creates a social basis for the criminalization and militarization of Russian society.

Antrojo pasaulinio karo padariniai Lietuvos atminties kultūroje: kontekstai, vertinimai ir sampynos

Straipsnyje siekiama apžvelgti pagrindines istorinės atminties kultūroje slypinčias įtampas ir problemas Lietuvoje, susijusias su traumine XX a. antros pusės Lietuvos ir Vidurio bei Vidurio Rytų Europos istorija. Straipsnis suskirstytas į penkias problemines dalis, jose analizuojamos Europos Sąjungos politiniu lygmeniu priimtos rezoliucijos ir deklaracijos, skirtos sovietinio ir nacistinio režimų vertinimui; nacionalizmo ir antikomunizmo santykiui Lietuvos ir Europos atminties kultūroje žlugus SSRS. Analizuojamos komunikacinės atminties ir gyvų totalitarinius režimus išgyvenusių žmonių liudijimų validumo ribos ir disonuojančios šių režimų įpaveldinimo tendencijos bei kylantys iššūkiai viešajame diskurse ir įamžinimo erdvėse. Paskutinis poskyris skirtas metodologinei totalitarizmo paradigmos kritikai ir jos galimybėms atminties kultūros tyrimuose unikalios XX a. epochos patirties kontekste.

Kazimiera Jagniewska: The Victim of Soviet Crimes in Lviv in 1941

This article is an original text, groundbreaking in the literature of the subject, presenting the biography of Kazimiera Jagniewska (1915-1941), a scout and teacher of Polish. Jagniewska was a student of the Queen Jadwiga National Girls’ Middle School in Lviv, where she joined the XI Lviv Team of the Polish Scouting Association. She performed the functions of patrol leader, team aide and team leader in the Association. She published her first literary texts in a school paper „Ogniwo” and in a scouts’ periodical „Skrzydła”. After graduating from high school (1934), she studied Polish philology at the Jan Kazimierz Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Lviv (1934-1939). In the summer of 1939, she completed her sudies without graduation and was in the process of preparing her thesis, but she could not obtain a master’s degree due to the outbreak of World War II. She also began a course to becoe a scoutmaster in 1939. She has written a „Diary of a Wanderer” [Dzienniczek Wędrowniczki], which is an invaluable source of knowledge on the history of Lviv scouts.In the Armenian Cathedral her patrol listened to sermons of Father Jan Bogdanowicz. On February 19, 1937 she appeared with her Girl Guide patrol at the Polish Radio in Lviv in the broadcast Youth of Lviv in Front of the Microphone with a radio play „Girl Guide”. She organized summer and winter camps (Duszatyn, Łomna, Skole, Tarnawka and Ustrzyki in the Bieszczady Mountains, Kazimierz on the Vistula River and Worochta in the Eastern Carpathians). She participated in jointly organized camps of Polish and Romanian Girl Guides (around 1937-1939). She became friends with a Romanian scout – Simona Calargi. A group of Girl Guides from Romania visited Poland and went to Vilnius, Lviv and Troki in the summer of 1937. With Polish Girl Guides she participated in trips to Romania, visiting the city of Bucharest (Bucureşti), Sinaia, Brasov and Chernivtsi. Along with Lviv Girl Guides in Bucharest she was invited by the queen mother Mary Alexandra Victoria Sachen-Coburg-Gotha, and their camp in Predal was visited by the royal aide Major Sidorowicz. She was also a member of the Association of Academic All-Polish Youth, and in her views were silimar to that of national organizations. Communism and anti-Semitism were alien to her. This article attempts to characterize Jagniewska’s personality and her system of values. After the Soviet aggression against Poland (1939), she participated in the defense of Lviv in the Polish auxiliary service, among other places at the Technical University of Lviv. During the occupation by Soviet Russia (1939-1941) she worked in the Polish scout conspiracy in Lviv. On June 24 or 25, 1941, she was arrested by the Soviet NKVD, imprisoned, interrogated on suspicion of belonging to the „Armed Polish Scouting Association”. NKVD also falsely accused her of spying for the Germans. She was shot on June 28, 1941 in Lviv in NKVD prison at Łącki Street. She was buried in the Janowski cemetery.