The Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv. Graves of Polish soldiers

“I also visited the military cemetery, the one from 1920. There, unfenced, in an open field, in the immediate vicinity of the German military cemetery, which is nicely fenced and decorated with a beautiful monument, stand equal rows of Polish graves with iron crosses. The hand that does not respect tradition has spared them. They stand in perfect order, in even lines, as if at roll call”. This is what Marshal Piłsudski's aide-de-camp, Captain Mieczysław Lepecki, wrote about the soldiers' graves at the Baikove Cemetery. It was a stop on his extraordinary journey through – as he described it – the Soviet Caucasus. The construction of the cemetery took a long time. It was opened on 3 May 1935, a few days before the Marshal's death. At that time it was the only proper Polish military cemetery on the territory of the USSR. Several years later it was destroyed. Maria Bondziuk-Berezowska, who remembered the soldiers’ cemetery from before the war and lived to see free Ukraine, passed on her recollections to the local Poles. Thanks to the efforts of the Kyiv National and Cultural Association of Poles “Zgoda” and the Polish diplomatic mission, a new monument has been erected and the memory of this place has been restored.