The murder of Grzegorz Przemyk was one of the most famous communist crimes of the 1980s. The propaganda campaign, the aim of which was to blame the death of the ambulance workers, was for the public testimony to the cynicism of the regime.
In the afternoon of May 12, 1983, three students of the Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski - Grzegorz Przemyk, Cezary Filozof and Jakub Kotański. They were going to celebrate passing the high school diploma. After reaching ul. Świętojańska, Grzegorz jumped on a piggyback much shorter Cezary. After walking a few steps, they fell onto the pavement. A group of colleagues attracted the attention of the crew of the police car standing at Castle Square and the ZOMO officers. Two of them identified Grzegorz and his colleagues. Przemyk did not have an ID card with him. So the Zomowcy demanded that he go with them to a nearby police station. He asked his colleagues for his mother to provide the militia with an ID card. Cezary the Philosopher decided that he would not leave his friend alone and go with him to the police station. At the entrance to the police car, Przemyk was hit several times with a truncheon. Around 17.30 they arrived at the police station at ul. Jezuicka.
The events of the next minutes are known mainly from the account by Cezary the Philosopher. Immediately after entering the police station, one of the policemen identified Cezary, and another hit Przemyk in the face, stating that he would "teach him to carry papers". Przemyk replied that martial law was no longer in force and that there was no obligation to carry documents. Moments later two zomowców entered the room. The personal details of one of them are unknown to this day. The second was Ireneusz Kościuk. The slicker lunged towards him as he prepared to deliver the first blow. At this point, another policeman, Arkadiusz Denkiewicz, burst in and ordered his colleagues to beat "so that there were no traces". Przemyk's screams were heard outside the police station when Jakub Kotański arrived there with his ID card. Finally he decided to go inside. He noticed that the policemen were extremely nervous. About this time, one of them, inspector Roman Gembarowski, decided to call an ambulance. Talking to the dispatcher, he stated that the detainee was probably mentally disturbed.
At about 6 p.m., an ambulance arrived in front of the police station, the team of which consisted of two paramedics - Michał Wysocki and Jacek Szyzdek. When they entered the police station, Przemyk was sitting in a chair, his friend shouting at one of the policemen. The rest of the Zom members suggested to the paramedics that the detainee was a drug addict, but there were no signs of a syringe puncture on his hands. They both guessed that the high school graduate was simulating a mental illness in order to get out of the police station. In the ambulance, they suggested they knew he was a simulator and would take him home. Przemyk was silent. He only spoke when they reached the emergency building on Hoża Street. On the spot, Przemyk's condition deteriorated so much that he was unable to walk on his own. The summoned psychiatrist decided that Przemyk should be taken to a psychiatric hospital. At this point, the beaten's mother appeared at the clinic and, seeing that he had no visible injuries, demanded that he be taken home.
The next day, his condition worsened so much that Barbara Sadowska called an ambulance, and then a doctor she knew, who recognized the symptoms of internal hemorrhage. Enormous internal injuries were found in the hospital in Solec. One of the doctors told Barbara Sadowska that her son had no chance of survival. Grzegorz Przemyk died on May 14 at 1:15 pm. His funeral in Warsaw's Powązki cemetery was a manifestation of resistance to the communist regime.
On May 16, 1983, his mother quoted in an interview for a correspondent of the American television ABC the words she heard when she was imprisoned in the Rakowiecka prison in Warsaw a year earlier: "You, Sadowska, we cannot move, but we will take care of your son." Grzegorz Przemyk permeated the atmosphere typical of anti-communist activists' homes. He was interested in poetry published in the underground and the music listened to in those circles. From the second half of the 1960s, his mother's apartment was a meeting place for artists reluctant to communist rule. From 1976, Barbara Sadowska was monitored by the SB as part of the operational investigation of the "Parisian". The pretext was an attempt to transport literature from émigré to Poland. In March 1982, Sadowska again found herself in the circle of the security services. During the party on the occasion of Grzegorz's name day, the police burst into the apartment in search of tissue paper. Sadowska was arrested and released only after two weeks. On the same pretext, she was arrested on April 29, 1983. On May 3, the Nazis stormed the seat of the Primate's Committee for Aid to People Deprived of Freedom and their Families in the Franciscan convent in the Old Town, demolished its premises and beat up opposition activists. Sadowska's finger was broken and there were threats that "something" might happen to her son.
Among the reasons for the aggression of the Zom members against Grzegorz Przemyk, not only the opposition activity of his mother was indicated, but also the sympathies of the students of the high school, which he and his friends attended, in solidarity. During the Carnival of "Solidarity", young people from Frycz-Modrzewski were active in the sejmik of student self-governments. The so-called silent breaks. High school students had already been detained by the police in demonstrations of "Solidarity". A few days after Przemyk's death, his friend from a parallel class, Wojciech Cejrowski, was also beaten.
According to historians investigating the Przemyk case, the authorities almost immediately launched a disinformation campaign to wash away the responsibility from the policemen. On May 16, the prosecutor's office launched an investigation into manslaughter. Three days later, after a meeting with the prosecutor general, Henryk Pracki, deputy prosecutor general, took over the course of the investigation. From then on, the entire investigation was controlled by the Ministry of the Interior. In the following weeks, Pracki spoke many times with the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, General Czesław Kiszczak. Among those supervising the investigation was General Mirosław Milewski, the secretary of the Central Committee for the administration of justice. He was one of the most dangerous and ferocious enemies of Kiszczak. In response to Milewski's attacks, Kiszczak decided to engage government propaganda. On June 30, in a letter to the spokesman of the council of ministers, Jerzy Urban, he wrote that the witnesses saw the brutal behavior of paramedics towards Przemyk. On the same day, the MO commandant stated that there were no grounds for accusing the militiamen.
The MO reports also tried to create an unambiguous image of Grzegorz Przemyk's environment. In the media, Barbara Sadowska was supposed to be an "alcoholic", and Cezary the Philosopher, "a drug addict and a representative of the social margin." Analyzes of the militia "indicated" also a tendency to brutality manifested by orderly Michał Wysocki. "The Ministry of the Interior wants to prove at all costs that the policemen are innocent," wrote Mieczysław F. Rakowski in his diary after an interview with the prosecutor general of the Polish People's Republic, Franciszek Rusek, who complained that Kiszczak's officers treated his subordinates with great contempt. Rakowski rightly assessed the intentions of the Ministry of the Interior. Kiszczak's note has survived in the case files: "There is to be only one version of the investigation - paramedics."
At the same time, the case was gaining international attention. In June, Barbara Sadowska was received in audience by Pope John Paul II. The US ambassador to the United Nations spoke about the murder. “There was a surprisingly harmonious and, as always, harmonious chorus of protests at home and abroad. All this in order to make one more Polish tragedy to make one's own political capital "- wrote in" Życie Warszawy "from 23 July 1983. According to Cezary Łazarewicz, the author of the report" Let there be no traces ", the author of the words from the newspaper was Col. Romuald Zajkowski from The Ministry of the Interior, which admitted years later that it often prepared materials ready for printing for the press. The propaganda response was also an increase in the number of reports and television programs devoted to the effectiveness of the militia in the fight against crime.
The formal culmination of the long process of building a lie was the trial of paramedics accused of beating Grzegorz Przemyk. On July 16, 1984, Michał Wysocki was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, and Jacek Szyzdek - one and a half years. They both regained their freedom under the amnesty of July 21, 1984. The doctor Barbara Makowska-Witkowska, who was falsely accused of beating and robbing another patient, was also sentenced. She spent thirteen months in prison. Her conviction was to give credibility to the narrative about the disastrous practices in the Warsaw ambulance service.
In September 1984, the policemen involved in the case were awarded special financial prizes by the Ministry of the Interior. The justification stated: “The verdict of the court was not only a moral satisfaction of the accused MO officers, but also a compensation for all the officers of our ministry who were attacked in an indiscriminate way. It constituted a kind of rehabilitation of our apparatus in the eyes of society ”.
In a letter after the death of her son, Sadowska wrote: "People with a copper forehead, identifying the militia with the authorities, decided to sacrifice the truth for their immediate benefits, to compromise the justice system in Poland with cynical manipulations that would one day be an example of injustice in a book. I don't suppose it will happen soon. It will be at such times when the systematic desecration of the grave of my blessed son Grzegorz will be only a shameful sign of today's reality. " Sadowska did not live to see the end of the People's Republic of Poland. She died on October 1, 1986 of lung cancer.
After 1989, when the sentences issued in 1984 were overturned, the case was returned to the court. Ireneusz Kościuk was acquitted in 1997 by the Provincial Court in Warsaw, and Denkiewicz was sentenced to two years in prison, but he did not serve a day because, according to psychiatrists, his mental condition prevented him from serving his sentence.
Successive trials of Kościuk started three times: in 2000, in 2003 and 2004. The first time the court decided that the case was time-barred, the second - it acquitted Kościuk again; it was only in May 2008 that the District Court in Warsaw found him guilty and sentenced him to eight years in prison, but as a result of the amnesty, the penalty was reduced by half. The court then noted that the beating, which resulted in Przemyk's death, was a crime committed by a public official in connection with the performance of official duties, and therefore there was no statute of limitations.
This judgment was, however, overruled in December 2009 by the Court of Appeal in Warsaw, which found that the case was time-barred on January 1, 2005. SA explained that the beating, which resulted in Grzegorz's death, did not fall within the concept of "serious damage to health" "Or" serious injury ".
A cassation appeal against the judgment of the Court of Appeal was lodged in 2010 with the Supreme Court by the then prosecutor general, Minister of Justice Krzysztof Kwiatkowski. However, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal because it considered it unfounded. He indicated that the District Court found the policeman guilty, but at the same time did not find that it was a communist crime, which - according to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance - expires after thirty years. As neither the prosecutor nor the attorney of Przemyk's father did not challenge this, according to the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal could not conclude that it was a communist crime and discontinued the case.
The investigation into Przemyk's death was also conducted by the Institute of National Remembrance. In 2009, the former Minister of the Interior, Czesław Kiszczak, heard accusations of obstructing the explanation of the death of the high-school graduate, but in 2012 the Institute discontinued the proceedings against him and twenty other suspects due to the statute of limitations.
The decision of the IPN investigators appealed to the District Court for Warsaw-Śródmieście, inter alia Przemyk's father - Leopold, Cezary Filozof and the former lawyer of Przemyk's mother - Maciej Bednarkiewicz. They demanded that the proceedings be resumed, but in May 2013 a Warsaw court upheld the decision of the institute's investigators.
On May 3, 2008, Grzegorz Przemyk was posthumously awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. He was also commemorated, among others along a street in Warsaw's Praga Południe, plaques on the building of the Frycz-Modrzewski high school and the tenement house at Jezuicka, and a stone in the area of the church of St. Stanisław Kostka in Żoliborz.
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