Pinsk massacre

Pinsk massacre
Photographs of the Martyrs
Location	Pinsk
Date	April 5, 1919
Target	Bolsheviks - suspected
Attack type	Execution by a firing squad
Deaths	35
Perpetrators	Major Aleksander Narbut-Łuczyński of the Polish Army

The Pinsk massacre was the mass execution of thirty-five Jewish residents of Pinsk on April 5, 1919 by the Polish Army. The event occurred during the opening stages of the Polish-Soviet War, after the Polish Army had captured Pinsk. The Jews who were executed had been arrested whilst engaged in an illegal gathering presumably of a Bolshevik cell. The Polish officer-in-charge ordered the summary execution of the meeting participants without trial in fear of a trap, and based on the information about the gathering's purpose that was founded on hearsay. The officer's decision was defended by high-ranking Polish military officers, but was widely criticized by international public opinion.

The battle for Pinsk was won in March 1919 by General Antoni Listowski of the Polish Army commanding the 9th Infantry Division, wrote Dr Andrzej Nieuważny of Copernicus University. The city was taken over in a late-winter blizzard with considerable human losses sustained by the 34th Infantry Regiment under Major Narbut-Łuczyński who forced the Bolsheviks to retreat to the other side of the river. Before their withdrawal however, the Russians had raised an armed militia composed of a small, non-representative group of local peasants and young Jewish communists who kept on shooting at the Poles from concealment.

An interim civilian administration was set up in Pińsk, but the hostilities continued. There were instances of Polish soldiers being singled out at night and murdered. On April 5, 1919, seventy-five Jewish residents of the city met at a local Zionist center to discuss the distribution of American relief aid according to eyewitness accounts. Public meetings were banned at the time because random shots were still being fired. Some accounts allege that the meeting had received approval from Polish military authorities although the language barrier was severe, as many locals had no idea what it meant to be part of the newly-reborn Poland after a century of foreign rule. When Major Aleksander Narbut-Łuczyński heard, that the meeting was a Bolshevik gathering, he initially ordered his troops to arrest the meeting organizers. He was told that the purpose of the meeting was to plot an armed anti-Polish uprising and, without further investigation, ordered the execution of the hostages. Within an hour, thirty-five detainees were put against the wall of the town's cathedral, and executed by a firing squad composed of the Polish soldiers. It was claimed that some men and women were stripped and beaten.