Woman kills 4 children, ties them to tree with barbed wire rather than let them starve (graphic)

December 11, 1923
Antoniówka, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland
Marianna Dolińska kills her four children and hangs their bodies around a tree with barbed wire

Dolińska had been suffering from depression when she hanged her four children — Zofię, 6 months; Antoniego, 3 years; Bronisławę, 5 years; and Stefana, 7 years — to death before tying their bodies to a tree with barbed wire. Dolińska turned herself into police the following day, confessing to the murders. She stated her husband had been arrested recently for stealing food to help the family survive, and the Roma group the family belong to was dissolved. Left without support, Dolińska killed her children rather than see them starve during the harsh winter.

Dolińska was diagnosed with “psycho-madness” (which would now be classified as a form of depression, likely bipolar disorder) and lived out the remainder of her life in a psychiatric hospital, dying there in 1928.

The photographs of the children were later used to erroneously claim they had been killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943.

Marianna Dolińska