Years ago it was a famous and unsolved crime. Today, few residents of the Izbicko commune know that in the nearby forest there is a stone commemorating a murder from 90 years ago
It happened just after World War I. On March 3, 1920, in the forest between Otmice and Kamień Śląski, the count's forester was making a routine round. He knew that residents of nearby villages were involved in poaching. Post-war poverty was terrible and people were starving. The worst was the pre-harvest season, when last year's supplies were running out and nothing had grown yet. Despite severe punishments, villagers went to the forest for illegal hunting.
That day, the gamekeeper, Anton Skworz, had to catch the poacher red-handed. A shot was fired. The dead forester was found only after many hours. Despite the investigation, it was never possible to discover who the perpetrator of this crime was. Count Strachwitz, grateful for the faithful service of the gamekeeper, founded a commemorative stone in this place. There is an inscription in German on it: Anton Skworz Grafheger am 23/03/1920 in treuer Pflichterfüllung durch Mörderband gefallen (Anton Skworz, count's forester, killed on March 23, 1920 while faithfully performing his duties by a gang of murderers). Over time, the tragedy fell into human oblivion. The killer was never found.
The monument stood in this place until 1945. Then unknown perpetrators knocked it over so that the inscription was invisible. Only in 2005 did Krzysztof Ralla, Karol Tomaszewski and Erich Szotka set the stone again. They fenced it with a fence and tidied up the area. Recently, there is a small plaque in German on the fence.
The second chapter of this tragedy took place in the 1960s. A man worked at the lime kilns in Kamień Śląski and, after retirement, earned extra money as a guard. During the night shift, he told his friend that he was going to warm up at the lime kilns. He sat down by the stove and fell asleep. He didn't feel when his clothes caught fire from the heat. He started burning alive. When the fire was extinguished, it turned out that the burns were gruesome. The old man was dying.
Before he died, he managed to whisper his secret to a colleague. It was he who shot the forester Skworz 40 years earlier. The weight of this crime weighed so heavily on him that he confessed it despite his suffering. If it weren't for the accident at the lime kiln, the mystery of the murder from years ago might never have been solved.