In June 1941, about 9 km from Ostrów Mazowiecka, between the villages of Grądy, Rynek, Stok, Antoniewo, Sielc, Lipniki and Koziki Majdan, the Germans established a POW camp - Stalag 324 - which was to become one of the largest of all the POW camps. The camp occupied the area on both sides of the road to Różan, and most of the camp was located on the western side of the road, on the grounds of the village of Grądy and the former training ground of the 18th Light Artillery Regiment. The camp area was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, supervised by German guards. The location was convenient being only a few kilometres from the former border in occupied Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Prisoners captured during the Third Reich's attack on the USSR were sent to the camp. They were soldiers of the Red Army. Among them were also people of Jewish origin. It is estimated that approximately 100-120 thousand prisoners were sent to the Grądy camp.
Prisoners usually reached the camp after a multi-day journey to the assembly points. Due to starvation and exhaustion, the physical condition of many of them was tragic already when they arrived at Stalag 324. After arrival, the prisoners were subjected to selection. Political officers, members of the communist party, representatives of the intelligentsia and Jews were transported from the camp and shot in the anti-tank ditches in the forest near the village of Guty-Bujno which had previously been part of the Soviet border defence.
The camp infrastructure was extremely primitive. In the first days of transport, prisoners were placed in an open square, under the open sky. Soon, a complex of simple dugouts was built, approximately 50 m long, approximately 5 m wide and 2 m high, covered with a gable roof resting directly on the ground. These were dark rooms, full of moisture, which were likely to lead to illnesses. About 100 people were accommodated in each dugout, which resulted in crowding. There were no bathhouses in the camp. The food rations did not provide the appropriate amount of calories. Each 12 prisoners were given a loaf of bread and a few spoons of marmalade. Prisoners did not receive clothing, most of them wore the same tattered uniforms that they had arrived in.
Disastrous living conditions and extreme exhaustion caused numerous diseases: dropsy, bloody diarrhea, typhus, and pulmonary tuberculosis. There was a lice infestation in the camp. All this resulted in a huge mortality rate among prisoners. They also died in executions carried out by the Germans near the village of Guty Bujno, located 13 km from Grądy in the Białystok District near the Warsaw-Białystok road, and in the Stalag area. To intimidate the prisoners, at night the guards fired blindly between the dugouts. Every day, dozens of corpses were placed in huge pits dug on the edge of the camp. According to various estimates, approximately 80,000 people may have died in Stalag 324.
Stalag 324 ceased to function as an independent unit at the turn of October and November 1941. The surviving POWs were evacuated successively between November and December to a camp established in the barracks of the 18th Light Artillery Regiment in nearby Komorów, which was subordinated to Stalag 333 - Ostrów Mazowiecka. The POW camp in Grądy existed until the winter of 1942-1943 but the name Stalag 324 was transferred to a POW camp located near Grodno which had been in Poland before the Soviet invasion of September 1939 and is today in Belarus.
After liberation, the investigative commission conducted a general examination of the area near the camp cemetery. 8 mass graves were discovered with a total area of 13,864 square meters, with an average of 6 bodies per square meter. The bodies were usually placed in graves without clothing, and a small number of personal items, documents and coins were found. The lack of injuries - bullet wounds, fractures - in the examined bodies confirmed that most of the buried people died as a result of hunger, frost and diseases.
In 1947, a cemetery was established on the Stalag premises. In the years 1952-1953, renovation and maintenance works were carried out. In the years 1959-1961, the areas of camps A and B (on the left side of the Ostów Mazowiecka-Różan road) were afforested. November 21, 1961 a monument was unveiled. In 1967, an access road was built connecting the cemetery with the road.
The cemetery consists of 6 plots with 66 mass graves.
