"Do not forget our deaths, do not allow our deaths to be wasted," said Professor Stanisław Estreicher just before he died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in December 1939. The academic community of the Jagiellonian University is profoundly committed to the memory of his dying words. Every year for the past 76 years, on 6th November, the anniversary of the notorious arrest of 183 Cracovian scholars (including Prof. Estreicher) abducted from Collegium Novum, we have been paying tribute to the victims of that brutal attack on the Polish intelligentsia.

The annual memorial ceremony is held in Room 56, where their tragedy started. In the dramatic atmosphere of that room, in the presence of the authorities of the Jagiellonian University and members of the families of Sonderaktion Krakau victims, we read out the roll-call of the names of those who were arrested and died.

For over a decade now November the Sixth has been the University's Memorial Day, on which we remember all of the deceased professors, tutors, and students of the Jagiellonian University.

Floral tributes are laid in Collegium Novum, in front of three memorial tablets commemorating the professors of Lwów University murdered by the Germans, the Katyn Massacre, and the victims of Sonderaktion Krakau. We also lay a wreath at the foot of the Freedom Oak outside Collegium Novum, where soil has been deposited from Sachsenhausen, Dachau, and Katyn – sites where Cracovian scholars were murdered.

Memorial candles are being lit up in the cemeteries of Kraków…

We shall always remember!

Rita Pagacz-Moczarska

 

Chief Editor