The funeral ceremony is scheduled for Saturday after the remains of 42 people were exhumed from an unmarked mass grave earlier this year.
It will be the first such commemoration in several years, following Ukraine’s decision to lift a ban on searches for Polish victims of wartime killings.
“We are preparing for the funeral of the remains we have exhumed—the first such ceremony in nearly a decade," Maciej Dancewicz, deputy head of the Freedom and Democracy Foundation (WiD), a Warsaw-based NGO, told public broadcaster Polish Radio.
He said the funeral is especially significant because, unlike many previous burials, the victims will be laid to rest in individual graves, each marked with a cross, rather than in a common grave.
The site in the former Polish village of Puźniki, now Puzhnyky in Ukraine's western Ternopil region, is linked to a February 1945 massacre in which Ukrainian nationalists killed Polish villagers.
Ukrainian nationalists were responsible for a wave of ethnic violence between 1943 and 1945 that Polish historians describe as genocide, claiming around 100,000 lives.
Photo: PAP/Artur Reszko
The former Polish village of Puźniki in what is now western Ukraine. Photo: Krystian Maj/KPRM
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Source: IAR, PAP
Click on the audio player above for a report by Michał Owczarek.