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Grzegorz Przemyk (17 May 1964 – 14 May 1983) was an aspiring Polish poet from Warsaw, who was murdered by members of the Communist police force, the Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens' Militia). His killing was one of many such politically motivated murders perpetrated against democratic opposition by the Communist regime of Poland during the martial law period.
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Grzegorz Przemyk (17 May 1964 – 14 May 1983) was an aspiring Polish poet from Warsaw, who was murdered by members of the Communist police force, the Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens' Militia). His killing was one of many such politically motivated murders perpetrated against democratic opposition by the Communist regime of Poland during the martial law period.
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Beating and death Grzegorz Przemyk was the only child of Barbara Sadowska and they lived together in what was described as "a tiny flat on the eleventh floor of a tower block in the centre of Warsaw". His mother, Barbara Sadowska, who was a poet and a member of the Workers' Defence Committee, was frequently arrested and questioned by the Polish Secret Service (Służba Bezpieczeństwa, SB) for her activities in the opposition movement. On several occasions officers questioning her made various threats, including suggestions that her only son, Grzegorz, might be hurt in an accident. The last time she was questioned before the incident was at the end of April 1983. On 3 May 1983, she was assaulted by "unknown perpetrators". 12 May 1983 was the day of Grzegorz's graduation from high school, as well as the anniversary of death of Józef Piłsudski, a statesman and leader of the Second Polish Republic, considered a class enemy by the communist authorities. Celebration of this date was illegal in Poland and always a cause for concern by the police and the SB. Around 3 p.m., Grzegorz Przemyk and his friends, Cezary Filozof, Piotr Kadlčik, Igor Bieliński, and Kuba Kotański, left together to…
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Przemyk's funeral on 19 May, which took place at Powązki Cemetery, and which was officiated by Jerzy Popiełuszko, turned into a spontaneous demonstration against the communist regime, attended by 20,000 to 60,000 people marching in silence.
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Cover-up operation On 20 May, at Ministry of Internal Affairs, the minister Czesław Kiszczak held a closed meeting to plan the government's response to the scandal. One of the officers, Romuald Zajkowski, presented results of an internal investigation concluding that this is "a purely criminal case rather than a political one", which may lead to "conviction of a few sadists in the police force" at worst, suggesting a regular investigation by law enforcement institutions. This was however fiercely protested by general Józef Beim, head of the police, who did not agree to "sacrifice his men". Shortly after, Kiszczak decided that the investigation must be controlled and lead to conviction of the paramedics, while policemen should not even appear as suspects. Prosecutor general Franciszek Rusak, however, published a note in Życie Warszawy mentioning the start of an investigation to "determine the mechanism of injuries" Przemyk suffered. This caused a very aggressive reaction from Kiszczak and his deputy Władysław Ciastoń, who threatened Rusak and requested that their version be presented from the very beginning. Having read the note, Cezary Filozof reported himself to the prosecutor's office on 23 May and produced a detailed witness statement, which was fully consistent with the forensic…
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Trial In December, the indictment was ready to be passed to the court for trial. SB, however, disputed it and managed to soften some of the claims, criticising the prosecution for "still believing that Przemyk was beaten at the police station". In April 1984, prosecutor Rusek was replaced by Józef Żyta, who vigorously proceeded to remove traces of Kościuk and Denkiewicz from the indictment. To that end, officer Stanisław Wyciszczak was assigned to devise every possible argument to present the most damning witness statements of Filozof and Kotański as unreliable. The forensic evidence, however, was still there, as the experts refused to modify it to suit the police's version. Kiszczak made one more attempt to pressure prosecutor Gonciarz to remove the policemen from the indictment, which he refused to do and resigned from his position in protest. As result, the indictment was left unsigned, and thus formally incomplete. As a workaround, an unrelated prosecutor Anna Jackowska signed it after changing the qualification of policemen's actions to simple "beating" while the paramedics were indicted of the much more serious "fatal beating". The two doctors were previously indicted for "negligence". The trial started on 31 May and attracted broad attention of international…
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Relationship with Popiełuszko murder Shortly after, in October 1984, priest Jerzy Popiełuszko was murdered by Grzegorz Piotrowski, an officer of the SB Secret Service. Mieczysław Rakowski made a note in his personal diary on that subject that the acquittal of the policemen "might have only encouraged Piotrowski and his friends".
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Repeated investigations and trial at the Institute of National Remembrance Przemyk's investigation was restarted in 1993 after the fall of communism with his father Leopold Przemyk as subsidiary prosecutor. The case against the policemen dragged on for years and in 2010, after a number of appeals, it was eventually remitted due to expiration, leaving Arkadiusz Denkiewicz as the only convict. Leopold Przemyk filed a case then with European Court of Human Rights, which in 2013 decided that none of the Poland's investigations in this case were intentionally delayed. In 1998, another investigation against Czesław Kiszczak was started by the Institute of National Remembrance for interfering with the original investigation from 1983. This prosecution collected a large amount of evidence, but the case was also eventually remitted in 2012 after years of legal battles.
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Legacy On 3 May 2008 Przemyk was posthumously awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, by the late President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński. The song "Over My Dead Body" from the 1984 album "Meltdown" from Christian recording artist Steve Taylor was dedicated to the memory of Grzegorz Przemyk. In 2018, Polish President Andrzej Duda laid a wreath at the memorial for Przemyk at the XVII Modrzewski High School, which Przemyk attended before his death. A film about Przemyk's death, Leave No Traces, was released on 21 September 2021.
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Sources Gazeta.pl, Przemyk, Grzegorz (1964-1983) (in Polish) Polskie Radio, 25 years after the death of 19-year-old Grzegorz Przemyk (in English) IPN, Archive photographs from the funeral of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko at the Institute of National Remembrance website