Nagrobek Emila Barchańskiego

On the upright slab of pale stone a bare tree, bent by the wind, interlaces with a cross with broad arms: not two elements set side by side but a single figure, its roots running down between the inscriptions. The grave, in the Bródno cemetery, is that of Emil Barchański — the schoolboy who died in June 1982, three days short of his seventeenth birthday, and is held to be the youngest victim of martial law in Poland.

The tree with its roots showing is one of the words of Antonina’s funerary vocabulary, beside the stone book and the drop; for the same boy she also signs the bronze «Pamięci Emila B.». The gravestone is still in place, in section 46 of the cemetery.