Stalinist-era judge to go on trial in Poland

A 94-year-old former communist judge will go on trial next month over his role in the execution in 1952 of a pilot who had tried to escape Poland for the West.

The case is the first of its kind against a judge from the communist era, when thousands of opponents of the regime were sentenced to death, reports the Gazeta Polska daily.

The defendant is Bogdan Dzięcioł, who at the time was a military judge and who later, in the 1970s, was appointed to Poland’s Supreme Court. In 1952 he had been one of a panel of jurors that sentenced Edward Pytko, a military pilot, to death.

In July of that year, Pytko had received orders to monitor and report on his colleagues, which he refused to do. The following month, he commandeered a plane and sought to escape to the West.

Although he managed to reach Austria, he was forced to land at an airport that was part of the Soviet-controlled zone. If he had been able to fly just a few minutes longer, he would have reached the American zone. After landing, the Soviets returned him to Poland, where he was put on trial.

The very same month, after a one-day trial, the 23-year-old Pytko was sentenced to death by a military court. Three days later, the Supreme Military Court upheld that verdict. On 29 August – 21 days after being detained and 11 days after first standing trial – the pilot was executed.

His body was buried in an unmarked grave and his family were not informed about the execution. Only over 60 years later, in March 2015, did Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) identify his remains. Later that year he was buried at a mausoleum for victims of Stalinism at Warsaw’s historic Powązki cemetery.

Meanwhile, in 1993, after the fall of communism, a military court had declared the 1952 sentence against Pytko to be invalid. In 2019, the IPN, which has prosecutorial powers, brought charges against Dzięcioł, the one surviving judge among those who had sentenced the pilot, for “communist crimes and crimes against humanity”.

Robert Janicki, an IPN prosecutor, told Gazeta Polska that the court proceedings against Pytko did not even comply with the law of the time. Dzięcioł, who held only the rank of assessor, was not entitled to rule on the case.

Since 2019, the case against Dzięcioł has been repeatedly delayed, first of all due to the coronavirus pandemic and then because, in 2021, the former judge’s lawyer asked for his client’s health to be assessed amid doubts over whether he could stand trial.

Last month, medical experts ruled that he could, though with his court appearances limited to a maximum of one hour at a time. His first two hearings will take place next month, with another in April, reports Gazeta Polska.

“The age of the perpetrator is not a circumstance excluding prosecution,” Janicki told the newspaper. “Since the experts, after examining the accused, did not indicate any medical contraindications, I see no obstacles for this case to take place and the court to assess the events.”

Gazeta Polska notes that no judge who participated in issuing unlawful death sentence under communism has faced trial since 1989. But Janicki notes that the IPN “has hundreds [more] of investigations underway”.

In 2020, a new law lifted the statute of limitations on communist crimes. The following year, a current judge on Poland’s Supreme Court was stripped of legal immunity to face potential charges over issuing an unlawful conviction during the communist era.

Main image credit: NAC

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.