It's early 1941. It's 6,5 km to the German border and time is running short. Newly conquered Poland is supplying vast amounts of slave labour which is herded to toil on the construction sites of dozens of pillboxes screening the vital Warsaw-Grodno road.
Time is in short supply and the local population, entagled in the merciless machinery of forced labour, is obviously not allowed to peer behind the tall wooded fences hiding the places where huge concrete slabs are being erected. But they are good enough to dig vast antitank trenches which are supposed to protect Podbiele and Prosienica strongpints. And so they dig under a watchful eye of the Soviet masters.
It's 21 June 1941 and a sledgehammer blows falls from across the border. Thin Soviet defence force in the area evaporates under a merciless onslaught of the Wehrmacht. Some isolated pillboxed fight till their doom, most are abandoned without a shot and impressive antitank ditches prove useless.
And then, once the frontline moves far to the east, the merciless history finds a practical application for the derelict eartworks - but certainly not the one envisaged nby their designers. Countless "unneeded political elements", as the Nazis called them, are herded into the antitank ditches and shot en masse. They are all prisoners of war - Soviet officers and comissars.
It's estimated that between 1941 and 1943 more than 2.000 people had found their doom in the area. This number includes hundreds of Poles and Jews, too. Their names are unknown. For the Poles and Jews this is a tragic place, one of so many in this country. For the Soviets it's an ominous place where the ironic history made its merciless judgement and turned once powerful masters into a pile of corpses at the bottom of a long ditch - a dreadful place where the murderers slaughtered the murderers.
Sometime in the 70's, or maybe early 80's, when the Soviets were still considered, at least oficially, to be friends and allies, a row of simple concrete slabs was placed in the antitanck ditch, each adorned with a red star - unknown soldiers' graves where the Soviet officers were executed.
Today, ovegrown by trees and bushes, this place can only be reached by country roads winding their way through forests and clusters of trees dotted with ruins of dozens of pillboxes. It cannot be seen from an international Warsaw-Grodno-Moscow road which is, in fact, so close to it.
This photo is
Best on black at Fluidr 