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The young victims—one girl and three boys—were found by investigators from Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) at St. Wojciech’s Catholic cemetery earlier.

All four had been jailed in a special facility for Polish children aged up to 16 years old, known as Kinder-KZ Litzmannstadt, during the German occupation of the city in World War II.

The IPN has identified the victims as Teresa Jakubowska, Stanisław Kurek, Janos Duka and Leon Marczawa, saying they all died in April 1944.

Teresa, who was just 12, was “brutally beaten” by the director of the camp’s girls section, Sydonia Bayer, researchers said. The teenage boys died as a result of exhaustion and disease.

“The discovered remains have been removed and will undergo anthropological examination and genetic identification,” investigators confirmed.

The IPN—which investigates Poland’s tumultuous 20th-century history—has so far found burial sites for around 77 of the estimated 200 minors who perished at the facility, including 16 at the cemetery, which is located on Kurczaki Street.

Between 2,000 and 3,000 young Poles are believed to have passed through the camp, which was adjacent to the ghetto the Nazis established for the city’s Jewish population until it was emptied during the Holocaust.

Teresa Jakubowska’s tragic end

The fate of Teresa Jakubowska is one of the better-known stories from the children’s camp because it was described in detail during the trial of supervisor Eugenia Pohl in the 1970s.

Witnesses described Teresa as “very thin” and “spindly,” dressed in worn-out clothes and often in trouble for stealing other prisoners’ bread. Following one such occasion in February 1944, camp guards beat her up in front of the other children and poured cold water over her in chilly temperatures, fellow prisoner Zofia Szope said.

“We were standing in a row and we had to watch,” she said. “She was beaten on a stool and when she fainted, water was poured over her. One [girl] had to hold her arms, another her legs.”

Polish children held at the Nazi concentration camp for minors in Łódź. Photo: Archiwum Fotograficzne Stefana Bałuka/Public Domain.

She was taken to the camp infirmary but beaten again later by girls’ camp chief Bayer and Pohl. The German officials threw young Teresa naked into the snow, telling her to lie there, before beating her.

“She was lying down and they beat her with a whip until she fainted,” Emilia Mocek told judges during Pohl’s trial. “Then they ordered two jugs of water to be brought and poured them over Teresa. They left her in the freezing cold.”

Another witness, Jan Woszczyk, said she was “covered in ice crystals” with blood “running from her mouth, nose and ears.”

“Her face was frozen in a grimace of pain,” he said.

The camp was abandoned in early 1945 as German soldiers retreated from the east. Sydonia Bayer was caught and sentenced to death later that year. Pohl lived on in Łódź for decades before eventually receiving a jail sentence in 1974.

Source: TVP World