The Polish witnesses of the German crime in Wojslawice lived for decades with the memories of their Jewish neighbors executed in 1942. They remembered a meadow that flowed with blood, a child who cried out for water from underneath a pile of bodies, arms, and legs that still moved days after the execution.

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In the years that followed, those who had seen the crime shared their knowledge with their children, warning them to stay away from the spot behind the Orthodox church where some 60 Jews, among them 20 children, were murdered on that October day.

"When I was a young boy I was running around these meadows but the elders were saying: 'please do not run there because there are buried people, buried Jews,'" Marian Lackowski, a retired police officer whose late mother witnessed the execution in the small town in eastern Poland, said.

Born after the war, Lackowski has devoted years to ensuring that the victims receive a dignified burial, a mission he finally fulfilled Thursday as he gathered with Jewish and Christian clergy, the mayor, schoolchildren, and other members of the town.

Beginning at the town hall, the group walked solemnly down a hill to the execution site, their silence broken only by roosters and barking dogs. After they arrived at the spot, church bells rang out from the town's Catholic church and a trumpet called at noon. Jewish and Christian prayers were recited and mourners lit candles and placed stones in the Jewish tradition at a new memorial erected over the bones. "May their souls have a share in eternal life," it reads.

The mass grave site in Wojslawice is tragically not unique. During the German occupation of Poland during World War II, the Germans imprisoned Jews in ghettoes and murdered them in death camps including Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. But they also shot them in fields and forests near their homes, leaving behind mass graves across Poland, many of which have only come to light in recent years.

Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the act that started the war and began some five years of brutal occupation. Ethnic Poles were considered racially inferior by the Germans and sent to labor and concentration camps and sometimes executed on the streets. Jews were targeted for total destruction, a goal that the Third Reich came close to achieving.

Nonetheless, across Poland many regular people are engaged at the local level in preserving Jewish cemeteries or doing other work to preserve remembrance of the nation's lost Jews.

Agnieszka Nieradko, co-founder of a Warsaw-based foundation devoted to finding the unmarked graves and securing them, said the large scale of unmarked graves started to become clear about a decade ago. The person she credits with their discovery is Zbigniew Nizinski, a Protestant man whose religious convictions led him to pay tribute to the Polish Jews who helped make Poland a multicultural land for the centuries before the Holocaust.

Nizinski, often traveling by bike, would go to small communities and ask local people where the Jewish cemetery was. The response was often: Did he mean the old prewar cemetery, or the unmarked wartime grave? Nizinski would then report his discoveries to the Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries in Poland and created a foundation to help dedicate the sites.

Eventually the task was too much for Nizinski, and Nieradko and Aleksander Schwarz cofounded a foundation in 2014 under the auspices of the rabbinical commission to find and preserve as many Holocaust graves as possible, a race against time as eyewitnesses grow older and die.

The foundation is called Zapomniane, which means "Forgotten," but Nieradko has since come to realize that forgotten doesn't really capture the full truth of the unmarked graves.

"They operate somewhere on the margins of local history but they have never been forgotten. When we go to those places, we don't discover anything new for these people," she said. "Everyone knows about Jews buried in the forest or Jews buried somewhere on the meadow. It is oral history that is transmitted from generation to generation."

Nieradko and Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the American-born chief rabbi of the country, frequently travel to communities for ceremonies dedicating new memorials at the sites. Nieradko says over 50 mass grave sites have been commemorated, 70 have been secured with wooden markers and she believes there are more still to be found.

Schudrich said ceremonies like the one Thursday in Wojslawice give the Holocaust victims their much-deserved graves, and offer a sense of closure to local people who witnessed the murders.

Some Jewish survivors and descendants also finally have a grave to visit. Schudrich recalled how one survivor in Israel returned to Poland for the dedication of a memorial where her mother and siblings were killed after she got separated from them at the start of the war.

"She just stood and hugged the matzevah (grave stone) because she never got to see her mother again," he recalled.

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Even before the first responders felt the soft ground of the courtyard, they knew what was underneath: the latest mass grave in Raqqa, the former capital of the Islamic State group's self-declared "caliphate."

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On the first day of digging, they pulled out two bodies. Within a few days, that was up to nearly 20, including women and children, who had been stacked up in holes in the courtyard garden.

The discovery, seen by Associated Press journalists over the weekend, was the 16th mass grave found in Raqqa since Islamic State terrorists were driven out in the summer of 2017. Even as Raqqa's people gradually rebuild, the graves found in houses, parks, and destroyed buildings are a grim reminder of the horrors perpetrated by the terrorists and the massive violence inflicted on the city to remove them.

During their rule, Islamic State members carried out mass killings, public beheadings, and other atrocities. Women and men accused of adultery were stoned to death, while men believed to be gay were thrown from the tops of buildings and then pelted with stones.

More death came in the long aerial and ground campaign to liberate Raqqa, waged by Kurdish-led forces backed by airstrikes from the US-led coalition. The assault destroyed nearly 80% of Raqqa.

So far, 5,218 bodies have been exhumed from mass graves or from beneath the ruins of destroyed buildings around Raqqa, said Yasser Khamis, who leads the team of first responders. Of those, around 1,400 were IS fighters, distinguishable by their clothes, including some foreigners, he said. Of the remainder, 700 have been identified by their loved ones, mainly because they were the ones who buried the bodies.

Khamis said that limited resources have slowed the search and made it difficult to determine the cause of death for most of the victims. But those killed have died in airstrikes, land mine explosions, mass killings or they were IS fighters or victims buried by the group. Some were recently exhumed with handcuffs.

The dead found in the latest grave were likely killed in the last days of the furious battles for Raqqa, buried in a rush during the fighting. The house is located in Raqqa's Bedouin District, the scene of one of the last IS stands against the siege.

The house was built in a traditional Arab style, with a courtyard in the center. The outside walls were pockmarked with bullet holes. IS had used it as a school during its rule, and school notebooks and desks were strewn around the rooms.

In the garden in the courtyard, diggers pulled a new body from the ground on Saturday as an AP team visited the site. It had a uniform on it, the sign of an IS fighter. Digging ended Monday, with a total of 19 bodies found, including three women and two children.

Ibrahim al-Mayel, a digger, said that many of the bodies found had been piled roughly on top of each other in the ground.

Such house burials account for most of the city's mass graves as civilians buried their dead where they could, unable to go far as fighting intensified. Other graves in the same district — two in homes, two in gardens — have yielded 90 bodies.

At least two mass graves have been found in open areas in the city — a public park and a training compound— or on the city's edges, where fighters buried their own or people they killed. The grave in the park held at least 1,400 bodies, according to Khamis. His teams are still digging up bodies in a mass grave outside the city, where they found more than 700 so far.

"I expect that this Arab house is the last location in the city. We will then focus on the countryside," Khamis said.

Raqqa was the seat of the Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliphate, which at its height in 2014 stretched across a third of both Syria and Iraq. This year, the last village held by the group was retaken, in eastern Syria, though the terrorists are still present along the border and stage attacks.

In Syria's eight-year-old civil war, more than 100,000 people have been detained, abducted or gone missing, according to the UN, most of them disappeared by the government. Tens of thousands have likely vanished in mass graves, many of them victims of IS. Khamis said that his team has recorded 2,000 people missing from Raqqa, based on family reports. But he said that number doesn't reflect the full reality, since many families gave up on their missing, couldn't reach Khamis' team or moved to other areas.

His team only began collecting samples from bodies three months ago, hoping that new training and DNA technology would be available to help identify them. That means only 1,600 bodies of the 5,200 found had samples taken from them before reburial. "We need a lot more," he said.

In his offices in Raqqa, plastic bags carrying bone, teeth or hair samples were labeled and identified by location and number. International human rights groups say they are concerned that local forensic groups are not getting the support, expertise, and resources they need. Identifying the missing and preserving evidence for possible prosecutions is critical for Syria's future, they say.

"The worst thing I saw in my life at these graves is a man who comes looking for his child and can't find him," said Hwaidi Munawakh, one of the gravediggers.

He has worked on nine of Raqqa's mass graves. From one of them, he pulled out one of his cousins, a woman killed in an airstrike during the final battle for the city.

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Shortly after the Germans reached Poltava in September 1941, thousands of the city's Jewish residents were shot to death. A number of non-Jewish locals were also executed there.

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Lion wrote to Poltava Mayor Oleksandr Shamota: "As a representative of Israel, the state of the Jewish people, and as the son of Holocaust survivors, I am speaking in the names of those who cannot speak any longer and calling on your conscience and [that of] your city council members to stop this historic injustice."

Lion urged Shamota to "listen to the voices of the victims."

"As the Bible says in Genesis 4:10, 'The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.' I expect immediate action. You have the authority to choose between justice and injustice," Lion pressed the mayor in his letter.

Lion copied the Ukrainian prime minister and culture minister as well as the heads of local Jewish communities, stressing that evidence collected by both the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and a Ukrainian government body, thousands of Jews and gentiles alike had been executed by the Germans at the site in question.

At one time, Poltava was an important Jewish center in eastern Ukraine. Israel's second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, was originally from Poltava.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the city was home to some 13,000 Jews, who comprised approximately 10% of the city's population. The Germans occupied Poltava in September 1941, although many of the city's Jews managed to flee before the Germans arrived.

When the Germans asked the Jewish community to provide a census of the city's Jewish residents, they received a list of some 5,000 Jews, most of whom the Germans proceeded to execute in mass shootings carried out in September and November 1941. The bodies of the victims are still buried there.

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Belarus was home to a large, vibrant Jewish community before World War II, and the discovery of remains of at least 1,214 people in January shocked many who were still scarred by memories of the Holocaust.

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To the dismay of some Jewish leaders, officials stopped short of canceling the building permit at the site where remains of other victims might still be found, instead offering to bury the bones that were initially discovered.

The remains were buried in 120 coffins emblazoned with the Star of David in a ceremony at a cemetery outside town attended by city officials, Jewish community leaders, and diplomats.

Brest was one of the first Soviet Union towns to be attacked by Nazi troops and fell into German hands in July 1941. Like elsewhere in eastern Europe, the Nazi administration set up a Jewish ghetto. An estimated 28,000 people were confined there until it was destroyed in October 1942, when 17,000 residents were taken out of town and executed. The fate of the others remains unknown.

Famous Brest natives include the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who won a Nobel Peace Prize with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978. His father was among those rounded up and killed.

Regina Simonenko, head of the local Jewish community of Brisk, criticized authorities for rushing to bury the remains and continue with the building project instead of running DNA tests to establish identities.

"We were told that DNA tests are expensive and take a long time," Simonenko told The Associated Press.

The World Jewish Congress decried the construction project as "an affront to the memories of the Jewish residents of the city who were shot and murdered in cold blood at that very site."

City authorities insisted that the apartment block's foundation does not overlap with the burial site. Authorities have promised to put up a monument in the area and not build anything on the mass grave.

"There will be nothing but the lawn on the burial site," Brest Mayor Alexander Rogachuk said. "We're not even going to put up parking spaces or playgrounds there."

To Simonenko, that promise is not enough.

"We're talking about a large ghetto," she said. "We're not sure that there won't be other burial sites discovered there."

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The grave, found in the desert about 170 km (110 miles) west of the city of Samawa, contained the remains of dozens of Kurds made to "disappear" by Saddam's forces, Salih's office said.

They were among up to 180,000 people who may have been killed during Saddam's "Anfal" campaign that targeted Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s when chemical gas was used, villages were razed and thousands of Kurds were forced into camps.

"He killed them because they did not accept the continuation of this regime, because they wanted to live a free and dignified life," Salih, a Kurd, told a news conference at the grave site.

"He brought them to Samawa to bury them but our people in Samawa embraced them," Salih added. Iraq's southern provinces are predominantly inhabited by Shiite Arabs, who also suffered oppression and mass killings under Saddam, a Sunni Arab.

"The new Iraq must never forget these crimes that were committed against Iraqi people from all groups," he said.

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