Adam Błaszkiewicz : We still don’t know enough about the insurgents’ fate

“We still don’t know enough about the January Uprising participants, who are buried at the Rasos Cemetery. Our duty is to encourage deeper reflection on their lives” – said Adam Błaszkiewicz, chairman of Polish Scouting in Lithuania (Polish: Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego na Litwie) and a director of John Paul II Lower-Secondary School in Vilnius (Polish: Gimnazjum im. Jana Pawła II w Wilnie), one of the prime movers of the January 1863 Uprising participants’ commemoration.

The insurgents’ commemoration ceremony will be held on Thursday at the Rasos Cemetery. The preparations start today by cleaning the graves…

Adam Błaszkiewicz: The arrangements have already started. We managed to restore some of the graves with the help of the Social Committee for the Care of Old Rasos while the others thanks to the money raised by the scouts. In fact, the preparations have started long time ago. On Tuesday we want to clean leaves off the graves so the cemetery is ready for the ceremony.

Participants of the Thursday’s ceremony are going to visit 20 graves of the insurgents. What is the main aim of this visit?

The inscriptions on many headstones say: ‘Veteran of the Uprising’, but we have no further information about the particular veterans. The uprising’s participants returned to Lithuania after traversing Siberia, sometimes going through France or other countries. These are very interesting stories – interesting, for we still know very little about those people’s lives. Maybe this information could be found somewhere deep in the archives, however, at first glance, there are no records of these particular people in the available sources. This is the task for young history enthusiasts and also for history teachers to investigate the veterans’ biographies. It may start an action for the good cause. The Rasos Cemetery in Vilnius is a repository of historical knowledge, but it needs some more interest. That is why on 19^th of September, starting at 5 p.m. everybody is invited to wander these paths with us and to discover the history afresh.

What is the ceremony schedule?

I think it will be rather spontaneous. We would like it to be a kind of insurgents’ reminiscence of the history collected so far. If there is no information on a grave, we’ll treat it as a memento that something has to be done about it in the future. We’ll put flowers and light candles on every grave, say prayers and march in procession from one grave to another.

What is the youth’s attitude towards this issue?

Those who are interested in history, start looking for information, though I thought it would be easier. It turned out that we have to reach deeper into the archives and this is the task for people who are more interested in the issue or older ones because youths under 18 don’t have an access to the archives. I’ll say it again, this is the scope for the history teachers who know how to arouse youths’ interest with this case.

Source: http://zw.lt/wilno-wilenszczyzna/adam-blaszkiewicz-ciagle-za-malo-wiemy-o-losach-powstancow/

Tłumaczenie by Elżbieta Szafarz w ramach praktyk w Europejskiej Fundacji Praw Człowieka, www.efhr.eu. Translated by Elżbieta Szafarz within the framework of a traineeship programme of the European Foundation of Human Rights, www.efhr.eu.