By Małgorzata Margo Schulz
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation held its Fifteenth Annual Roll Call of Nations Wreath Laying Ceremony on Friday, June 10, 2022 at the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, DC, located at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and New Jersey Avenue.
Representatives from 15 embassies, 3 delegations, and 42 ethnic and human rights organizations gathered together with leaders of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) for the 15th annual Roll Call of Nations Wreath Laying Ceremony.
This memorial is the only one that honors and commemorates the more than 100 million individuals murdered in countries throughout the world on orders of communist regimes since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Readers recall that Andrzej Pitynski’s powerful sculpture in Exchange Place in Jersey City commemorates the approximately 25,000 Polish prisoners of war and other Polish citizens murdered on Stalin’s orders in April 1940 at Katyn and several other killing fields in the then western Soviet Union.
Poland’s Ambassador to the United States, Marek Magierowski, laid a wreath to commemorate all of the Poles killed by the communists.
On behalf of the Polish American Congress, Mr. John Czop and this writer laid a wreath to honor Polish victims of communism.
In addition to Canada and to most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, wreaths were laid by: Delegation of the European Union to the United States, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, and The Office of Tibet. Wreaths also were laid by the advocacy organizations of these countries.
The purpose of this commemorative event is not only to honor the memory of the more than 100 million victims of communism, but to celebrate liberty where it has triumphed, and to further our pursuit of a world free from communism.
