Three new names in the Garden of the Righteous in Warsaw

The Garden of the Righteous in Warsaw was created in 2014 at the Jerzy Jur-Gorzechowski square in the Wola District, on initiative of the History Meeting House and the Italian foundation GARIWO.

The Committee of the Garden of the Righteous in Warsaw strives to select people whose attitudes may serve as an example for others. The Committee commemorates people’s deeds rather than their biographies. The Righteous are a mirror in which the evil they had the courage to stand up to is reflected. 

Each year, three trees to commemorate the people selected by the Committee of the Garden are being planted during a formal ceremony. The Committee comprises distinguished personalities from the educational and cultural milieus. 

The names of the awarded are announced by the Committee on 6 March, during the ceremony on the occasion of the European Day of Remembrance for the Righteous, established by the European Parliament in 2012.

This year, the following three Righteous have been commemorated the Garden of the Righteous:

Sergei Adamovich Kovalev (1930-2021) - a Russian biophysicist, dissident, political prisoner, human rights defender, co-founder of the Memorial human rights organization;

Gareth Jones (1905-1935) - a Welsh journalist who was the first to inform the West about the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians;

Alfreda Markowska (1926-2021) - a Polish-Romani woman who during World War II saved approximately fifty Jewish and Roma children from death in the Holocaust and the Porajmos genocide.

Wednesday's ceremony at the Garden of the Righteous was graced by Bester Quartet which performs music of a vast stylistic range that assimilates some selected elements borrowed from classical, jazz and vanguard music.

The ensemble is a new edition of the legendary The Cracow Klezmer Band that was formed back in 1997 in Kraków, Poland as an initiative of Jarosław Bester – composer and accordionist.

The list of those honored in the Garden of the Righteous in Warsaw so far includes: Władysław Bartoszewski, Moshe Bejski, Hrant Dink, Marek Edelman, Bronisław Geremek, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Magdalena Grodzka-Gużkowska, Wilhelm Hosenfeld, Petro Hryhorenko, Julia Ilisińska, Jan Jelinek, Jan Karski, Roberto Kozak, Rafał Lemkin, Ewelina Lipko-Lipczyńska, Antonia Locatelli, Nelson Mandela, Hasan Mazhar, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Karol Modzelewski, Stanislav Petrov, Witold Pilecki, Anna Politkovskaya, Arseny Borisovich Roginsky, Raoul Wallenberg, Armin T. Wegner, Antonina Wyrzykowska and Aleksander Wyrzykowski, Liu Xiaobo, Jan Zieja, Adalbert Wojciech Zink, Antonina Żabińska and Jan Żabiński.