She went to the forest and hanged her 4 children. Yes, “the policeman advised her”

Marianna Dolińska was born in 1891 in Tworki. Her house never overflowed. In order to feed the family, my husband decided to join a group that robbed local farms. He was soon arrested, and the woman was left destitute with four children.

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She didn’t want to condemn the children to starvation. She hung them on a tree

For some time, Dolińska wandered around the nearby villages with the children, but she received no help from anywhere. The whole situation made her more and more devastated, until she finally decided to take a drastic step. Not wanting to condemn her children to poverty, cold and starvation, on December 11, 1923, she took them out to the forest and then hung them on one of the trees. The next day she reported her actions to the police.

Years later, another woman from the Doliński family returned to Marianna’s story. – It was decades ago. A Gypsy, this woman’s Roma, was arrested. And she turned to the policeman at the police station – probably where they arrested him – and asked what she should do with her children now. He won’t be able to handle it. And the policeman told her without a second thought: “If you don’t know what to do, hang them.” And so the Gypsies kept repeating: “And she was sick and she took it to heart.” And then she went to the police and said that she did what the policeman advised her to do – . Marianna Dolińska was arrested and later transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Tworki, where she was placed under the care of Witold Łuniewski. The specialist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and other somatic diseases. She died in 1928.

The history of the photo of Dolińska’s children. Over the years, the wrong story has been attributed to him

A few months after the woman’s death, Witold Łuniewski described her case in “Rocznik Psychiatryczny”. He also included a photo taken by the police at the crime scene, which he described as a “wreath of children.” Later, this photograph was used many times, but in the wrong context. In 1941, she appeared in the German daily “Nowy Kurier Warszawski” with the caption “This is how the Bolsheviks fight.” For years, there was also a false belief that it depicted children murdered in 1943 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The mistake was even repeated in 2003, when it was placed on the cover of the album “UPA Genocide on the Polish People”. The image of children even appeared on the monument to Polish victims of the UPA in Przemyśl, which disappeared only in 2008, when “Rzeczypospolita” published an article describing the circumstances of the photo’s creation.