MALBORK, Poland: Germans and Poles are laying ghosts of World War II to rest this week - more than 2,000 of them.

At a ceremony on Friday, they will rebury the bones that were discovered last fall in a mass grave at the foot of this northern Polish city's medieval castle, setting aside the grievances that linger from the war and often bedevil relations between the two countries.

But the uncertainties about who the dead were and who killed them may never be resolved. All that authorities can say with some assuredness is that they were probably German civilians who died in the ferocious final months of the war, in a city with a shared Polish-German past that dates back more than 700 years.