A court in Warsaw sent a former military judge to prison for five years, who in the era of Stalinism sentenced a young pilot to death for an escape attempt to the west. The current judgment is not final.
At the beginning of the trial, the Polish media wrote that it was the first trial of a judge who participated in political trials in the 1950s, during which thousands of people were sent to death by communist justice.
In addition to the prison sentence, a military district court in Warsaw on March 19 disqualified 96-year-old Bogdan Dzienciol from participating in elections for five years. According to the verdict, he committed a “communist crime and a crime against humanity in connection with the death sentence of Air Force Second Lieutenant Edward Pytek.”
After the communists came to power, pilot Pytko refused to participate in the surveillance and reporting of his colleagues, for which he was threatened with prison. In August 1952, he therefore flew across the border from the southern Polish town of Strzelce Opolskie during a training flight. When he got through the Czechoslovak territory, he ran out of fuel and had to land at the airport in the Austrian city of Wiener Neustadt. However, this city was in the Soviet occupation zone and the Soviets handed it over to Poland. The court, in which Judge Dzienciol also sat, handed down the death penalty after a trial lasting only one day. He was executed in late August 1952 after President Boleslaw Bierut refused to grant him a pardon.
Prosecutor Robert Janicki of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), who reported on the verdict this week, said the sentence against Pytek was an act of repression because the pilot had different views than those promoted by the state and party leadership at the time. His goal was to eliminate Pytek from political life. “With his behavior, Judge Dzienciol implemented the policy of a totalitarian state that used terror to achieve its political and social goals,” the PAP agency quoted Janické as saying. According to him, the judge participated in the political persecution of pilot Pytek by using judicial instruments.
Pytka’s remains were placed in an unmarked grave after the execution, and were only found in 2015. However, already in the 1990s, his death sentence was overturned and the pilot was rehabilitated. (ČTK)
