Class 7a
Zwierzyniec, 12 June 1946
My experiences of the German occupation
I lived through terrible times during the German occupation even though I was still small because I was only eight years old. We were living in Ruskie Piaski when the Germans came to Poland in 1939.
On 15 October 1939, Gestapo officers arrived at the village of Wólka Nieliska, decimated the men and shot six hostages as revenge for a runaway thief. The beginning [of the occupation] was a terrible thing, for nobody had ever seen anything like it.
After that horrible incident, we came to the village of Bagno where our house had been built. At the start of the war, the Germans set up a construction firm in Zwierzyniec to build roads and bridges. After the firm disappeared, the Germans established a penal camp where they put the evicted people and those they rounded up. The prisoners almost died of starvation and various tortures. Whoever survived for a certain period of time was carted off to an even worse camp like Majdanek or Auschwitz.
In 1942 there was a raid on a furniture factory and one Gestapo officer was killed. The Germans killed my grandmother as punishment. She was working in the field when the Germans came looking for bandits. When they saw my grandmother they said she was a bandit in disguise and they killed her.
On 30 March 1943, the Germans declared the village of Wywłoczka a bandit village, so when we got up on 30 March we found that the village had been surrounded by Germans and the Germans were driving everyone out into the square. Nobody was allowed to take anything with them. After everyone had been gathered there, the men were separated from the women and children and led to a camp which was located in little forest near Zwierzyniec. When the people had been taken away, the rest of the Germans started to throw grenades, shoot their guns and burn the village.
Suddenly a terrible wind started blowing in the direction of the village of Bagno and the fire ignited there. A second innocent village burned, as did our home. My mom and I – my dad and my brother were on duty at the narrow gauge railway in Zwierzyniec – were not able to rescue anything. We only thought about running away from there because the Germans had started shooting in the direction of Bagno. We fled to Zwierzyniec, but we had nothing with us except the clothes we were wearing, we didn’t even have any bread so we had to go begging from door to door. But we survived that terrible misery and suffering. People from Wywłoczka were in the penal camp in Zwierzyniec and were thinking of escaping, but there was no way to do it because they were being watched by German guards.
The nearby village of Sochy was destroyed in the same year but in a more horrible way. The Germans came in the morning and surrounded the village. The residents had no idea. They ordered people to bring out all their equipment, so they did, and then they were killed. Later, planes flew over and started dropping bombs and firing machine guns until the whole village had been razed to the ground and only a few people were left. [The Germans] sowed that kind of destruction everywhere.
They brought the evicted people to the camp in Zwierzyniec. We saw horrible things then, like how a driver brought the bodies of the dead – mainly children – to the cemetery every day.
One time, two women escaped and the gendarmes chased after them. Mom was gathering hay [at the time]. The women hid somewhere in the field, and when one of the Germans saw my mom he asked her where the women were. Mom didn’t know where they had gone, she said she didn’t know, but the German aimed his gun at her and wanted to shoot her. The German left when mom randomly waved her hand to show they had gone in this or that direction, but he didn’t find anything and mom was so scared that she still has problems with her heart to this day.
At midnight on 18 January 1945, the Gestapo came to Bagno and took seven hostages. After they had rounded them up, they took them to Zamość, where they were held, persecuted and tortured horribly for two weeks. Eventually, they brought 20 [prisoners] to Zwierzyniec and shot them in the presence of a gathered crowd at the market square. They were declared innocent after their deaths and it was permitted for them to be buried in the cemetery, but without a public gathering.
In the end, the time came for the Germans as well. Our slavery ended, and we were free.