Class 7
Jabłonna, Piotrków commune
My deepest experiences
On Sunday 12 April 1942, the village mayor Müller ordered the other heads to call a meeting with the whole commune of Piotrków. On Sunday morning, people went down to the commune [building] and the mayor stepped out onto the porch and said “There are so many of us that we will not be able to fit inside the commune [building]. Let’s go to the yard outside the manor house, into the farmyard.” He put people in fours with priests at the front, of which there were also four. They walked in a somber line, surrounded by gendarmes.
They went onto the farmyard through a little gate. They wanted to run away when they saw the gallows, but they couldn’t because there were so many gendarmes. The mayor counted them as they went in. There were as many as six nooses on the gallows. Soon, some buses came and one of them was carrying prisoners sentenced to death. The other buses carried gendarmes, the executioners who were going to kill the prisoners. A total of 27 people had been sentenced to death, 6 by hanging and 21 by shooting. The officer read out the names of the prisoners, for example, Królikowski, Sobota, Jurczyszyn. The ones to be shot were tied up in twos, the ones to be hanged went individually, their hands bound behind them.
The executioners took them and hanged them one by one. Each one had the words “Long live Poland,” “Long live independent and democratic Poland,” “Just as they hang us, so will you too hang them” on their lips as they died. They died heroically and regretted nothing.
When the gendarmes were done killing them, they ordered everyone to break up and go home. The dead lay there until the evening, and in the evening the stablemen took them to the cemetery in Czerniejów and buried them in a common grave. The gendarmes leveled the grave with the ground. But there was one good Pole who did not forget about the dead and who marked the grave with spruce branches. More and more wreaths and flowers were left at the grave of the fallen. When Poland was liberated, the owners made a cross and a plaque. We went to the grave on the first anniversary [of the murder]. There were very many wreaths and flowers. The sight of the dead burrowed itself into my memory such that I will not forget them until my dying day.