The Piaśnickie Museum in Wejherowo was founded in 2015. Shortly thereafter, conceptual work began on the museum's permanent exhibition, which was opened to the public in 2023. In the exhibition hall No. P8, dedicated to the victims of Nazi crimes, a touchscreen displays the names of 871 people who were murdered in the Piaśnica Forest. The authors of the permanent exhibition's content were the museum's employees at the time: Dr. Monika Tomkiewicz, Dr. Grzegorz Bębnik, Dr. Bogusław Breza, Dr. Marcin Szerle, and the two experts Prof. Bogdan Chrzanowski and Dr. Piotr Niwiński.
Since 2011, the Institute of National Remembrance in Gdańsk (IPN) – Department for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish People in Gdańsk – has been investigating the mass murders of Polish citizens committed in the autumn of 1939 in Piaśnica near Wejherowo. We assume that the investigation will lead to the most reliable possible number of people murdered in the Piaśnica forest and to the most complete possible identification of the victims: residents of Pomerania, patients of German and Polish psychiatric clinics, and passengers of transports from the Third Reich.
After World War II, the Polish public was given a death toll that was not based on facts, but which is still widely circulated today: “12-14 thousand Poles.” The efforts of the first researcher of Nazi crimes in Piaśnica, Dr. Barbara Bojarska, to correct this figure to around 2,000 Polish victims were met with resistance from the censors of the People's Republic of Poland and the blocking of the publication of her monograph. As part of the IPN's current investigations, it has so far been possible to identify around 1,300 names of victims from the territory of the Third Reich (mainly from institutions for the mentally ill) and around 1,200 names of Poles from Pomerelia who were shot in the forests of Piaśnica. This list will not be published due to the ongoing proceedings. This makes the opening of the public prosecutor's files and the publication of a new, up-to-date monograph on the Nazi crimes of Piaśnica with a list of the victims' names all the more eagerly awaited.
The extent of the Nazi crimes committed at Piaśnica is not evidenced by numbers, but by the brutally ended lives of real people: fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. As a result of the racist and Nazi policy of extermination against the leadership and intelligentsia of the Polish people, as well as the eugenics policy that excluded mentally ill people from German-national society, these people stood before mass graves dug in the forest, where their lives ended in a terrible martyr's death.
Honor their memory!