Grandson of a victim preserves memory of a tragic bus accident

It was almost 6 a.m. on September 13, 1969. A bus carrying Radlin Agricultural Cooperative workers returning from a trip to Tricity stopped in front of a bridge between Lubrze and Nowe MIasto nad Wartą, in order to allow a vehicle approaching from the other side to pass. In that moment, a local teacher left the bus. The woman had boarded the bus earlier as a hitchhiker.

Shortly after, the bus drove on. "We entered the bridge and suddenly I felt like the bus didn't fit into the bridge and scratched against it. I stood up, but instead of the road I saw the edge (...) The driver stood up holding the driving wheel, turned his head towards the passengers and said: "People, save yourselves!" - one of the passengers, Henryk Banasik, told TVN24 last year.

Another passenger, Julian Juskowiak, added: "The bus got stuck on a barrier for one last moment, hanged on it and then fell on its roof.

The noise could be heard in the area. Konrad Czosnowski, chief of "Jawor" Carpentry Cooperative in Nowe Miasto nad Wartą, recalled he had been shaving at the time, while his 16-year-old son had been standing on the stairs. "My son shouted: 'A bus fell off the bridge!'. It was 5:46. I told Andrzej to immediately call MO (Civic Militia), I jumped on a bike and shortly after I was at the crash site. Together with the others, we started to organise help," he told "Gazeta Poznańska".

Drivers of the four lorries parked nearby also rushed to help. First injured passengers were being taken to a hospital by residents. Later on, ambulances were taking the injured to hospitals in Środa Wielkopolska and Jarocin. "All local medical service were scrambled. In Jarocin, for instance, departmental nurses volunteered. In both cities people volunteered to donate blood for the injured," wrote "Gazeta Poznańska".

Already two days after the accident the papers began to blame the driver. "According to a KP MO (Civic Militia County Station) duty officer in Jarocin, the accident was most likely caused by the driver's weariness" - "Głos Wielkopolski" wrote on September 15, 1969.

This information has never been denied.

Ten people died in the accident. The eleventh victim died in a hospital a few days later.

51 years later, a grandson of Zygfryd Pawełczyk, one of the victims, carried out his private investigation into the accident.

"Each time I asked my grandpa, I heard the bus driver had fallen asleep on the bridge and killed passengers. Dad had been only 8 at the time and recalled going with my grandma to identify grandpa's body (...). This case kept bothering me," Łukasz Pawełczyk told TVN24.

He couldn't find any information about the accident in the internet. He only had one press clipping.

He began by visiting police stations in Jarocin and Poznań's Nowe Miasto. He did not find any information there, nor in the Institute of National Remembrance archives.

He then decided to search for people, rather than documents. An avalanche of comments appeared under his Facebook post.

This helped him to find more than 20 witnesses of the accident. Passengers, who travelled with his grandpa, families, like his own, which had lost their relatives, and a son of the militia officer in charge of the investigation.

"Everyone I spoke with said the driver hadn't been asleep. And that's the key issue - to once and for all relieve the driver from this burden, that he had fallen asleep, as people said after the accident," Pawełczyk said.

When an article about the accident was published at tvn24.pl in January, he said he wanted to make sure that no one ever forgot about the tragedy that had taken place 51 years ago. By that time he had already created a stone memorial plaque for the victims.

But only recently, after a green light from Środa Wielkopolska authorities, has the plaque been placed at the abutment of the bridge from which the bus had fallen down. Nowadays, the bridge is only used by the residents of a few houses standing between Warta and the floodplain.