Marianna Dolińska

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.

The Polish State Police had begun dispersing the Romani population, who were accused of stealing food and animals from rural farms.

[1] 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.

[2] 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.

[1] Two years later the image appeared in the work of the J. Węgierski "Home Army in the districts Stanislaviv and Ternopil", bearing the caption "murdered by the SS-Galicia, Polish children in the area Kozów".

Within the context of the Volhynian massacre narrative, these lines were wrongly interpreted to be barbed wire securing the children to the tree.

[1] In a 2019 article in the Polish academic journal Widok, Sara Herczyńska writes that the photograph "proved a perfect fit for the perpetrator-oriented discourse on the Volhynian genocide" and that its ubiquity could be explained as driven by the public's need to have a visual representation of the savagery of the massacres.

[1] In July 2003, a monument for victims of the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia was unveiled in Przemyśl, depicting Dolińska's children.

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.

Dolińska in the psychiatric hospital
A photograph of the murdered children accompanied a 1928 article by Polish psychiatrist Witold Łuniewski. It later came to be informally known as the "wreath of children". [ 1 ]
A second photograph of the children was published in 1948 in Wiktor Grzywo-Dąbrowski's A Manual of Forensic Medicine for Students and Doctors .
In another photograph, lines crossing the image, probably caused by folding of the developed print or scratches on the negative, were wrongly interpreted to be barbed wire securing the children to the tree. [ 1 ]
A monument in Przemyśl dedicated to victims of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army , depicted the "wreath of children". It was removed in 2008.