World War II plane, crew remains found in Polish river bed

“For now we have managed to find the instrument panel, the engine, a wheel and a well-preserved radio station”, commented Zdzislaw Leszczynski, director of the Museum of the River Vistula in Wyszogród, which is carrying out the excavation together with the SAKWA association. “They are everywhere”, said Jonny Daniels, head of the Jewish foundation From the Depths, who waded into a shallow area of the Vistula on Tuesday, picking up fragments of stones with Hebrew lettering.

Recent drought that brought river levels to record low in Poland has allowed access to the remains.

Among them is a Soviet fighter plane, believed to be a World War II-era IL-2, found in a dried lake near Warsaw and the Vistula.

Polish media said the remains of two crew members were also found. The plane has been taken to a museum in the nearby town of Wyszogrod, where it will be examined. It crashed through the thick ice into the river.

“People knew (about the plane)”, one resident said.

Russian embassy spokeswoman, Valeria Perzhinskaya, said that the plane and the remains could be identified by numbers on the wreckage, and the pilot given a proper burial. About 600,000 Soviet troops have been killed preventing the German military on Polish territory.

Falling water levels revealed the aircraft wedged in the mud in an oxbow lake in Kamion, about 70km (43 miles) west of Warsaw, the RMF radio website reports. Once the resting place of 300,000 Jews, only 3,000 tombstones remain there today; the rest was removed during and after the war and used as building materials and to reinforce the river’s banks.

According to Daniels, a man was walking along the river two weeks ago and came across stones with Hebrew writing. Now Daniels hopes to take college students there to do an extra thorough search and return something he can discover to the cemetery. “Jewish history is buried in the Vistula”.