Marianna Dolińska

Marianna Dolińska (1891–1928) was a Romani woman from the village of Antoniówka in Radom County, Poland. In 1923, after her husband was arrested for burglary and her wagon camp was dispersed, she wandered in the wilderness with her four children, aged six months to seven years. Fearing for their starvation, on the night of 11 December, she murdered them, hanging them from a tree. She confessed at a police station the following day. Dolińska was sent to a psychiatric hospital and died there in 1928.

Crime scene photographs of the bodies of Dolińska's children came to be known as the "wreath of children".

Murder of her children

Unable to receive help from the local Romani and Polish communities, the 32-year-old woman wandered with her children in the freezing swamps between the villages of Antoniówka, Dąbrowa Kozłowska and Siczki.

Hospitalisation and death During the six-month murder investigation, Dolińska was observed exhibiting frequent and violent mental changes; she had fits of rage and auto-destructive behavior, or would fall into a stupor for days at a time. Psychiatrists who examined her concluded that she was a "neutral perpetrator of the crime, a person without awareness of the consequences at the time of the act". Łuniewski wrote an article for the 1928 issue of the Polish Psychiatric Association's journal Rocznik Psychiatryczny. In his article he described Dolińska's case and included a photograph of the children, writing that the "horrifying sight has been photographed by our criminal investigators and the picture is currently in our possession."

Publication of the photographs Three photographs of the dead children are known to exist, taken from slightly different angles. The photographs of the crime scene came to be known as the "wreath of children". the earliest known publication of one of the photographs with a false claim of origin was on the front page of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Nowy Kurier Warszawski on 2 July 1941, where it was accompanied by the headline "This is how the Bolsheviks fight!" The broadsheet claimed that the dead children were murdered by the Soviets in a village near Vawkavysk in 1919.

The Nationwide Committee for Erecting a Memorial to the Victims of OUN-UIA Genocide was founded in 2006. The committee's mission was to build a monument in downtown Warsaw. A design modeled on the "wreath of children" photographs was submitted by sculptor Marian Konieczny and selected by the committee. The proposed sculpture, depicting children nailed to the trunk of five-meter tall winged tree, garnered controversy in the media and prompted an exposé of the history of the photographs by Ada Rutkowska and Dariusz Stola.