Exhumation and reburial of ghetto victims

... our heroes and resistance fighters, murdered after the Nazis brutally suppressed the Bialystok ghetto uprising, were placed in a mass grave. This military grave was dese- crated, violating Polish tradition of paying special honor to fallen soldiers. In no other ghetto or concen- tration camp — Warsaw, Treblinka, Sobibor, Ausch- witz — were there remains of fallen heroes. Only Bialystok preserved a mass grave of its dead until 1971. The Germans had, after all, not burned the bodies of our victims. Rather, they threw them into a pit, a gar- bage dump as it were, and on top of their corpses shot another fifty-five, captured after the ghetto was liqui- dated in 1943. With the greatest respect, the Polish and Jewish communities of Bialystok honored their memo- ries on April 11, 1946, exhuming their remains and re- burying them in a mass grave. ...