Aniela Chojnacka
Class 5
Public Primary School in Wąchock
District of Iłża
On 28 October at 4 a.m. someone knocked at our window. Dad got up, opened and looked who [had come] that early. It turned out that it was our neighbor. “What happened?” Dad asked surprised. “What is going to happen now? A train [was] blown up on our [railway] track. The Germans encircled our village, we have to run!” [the neighbor] said. “But where?” “To the next village” mum answered quickly, who was helping daddy put his clothes on. There was bustling around the house. His entrance woke me up, scared I sat on my bed, I didn’t know what to do. Before my eyes I had the picture of gendarmes abusing people from our village. Dad left the house quickly, in order to move to the other village, before the sun rose.
Everyone in our house had woken up already, everyone was worried thinking what was going to happen now. I looked at the window and fear made me speechless for a moment. Wherever I looked, I saw grey silhouettes of gendarmes. A moment later they entered our house. My little sister started crying as she saw them. [A gendarme] murmured sharply “Why are you crying? We are humans too. Where is your father?” he asked me. Mum answered, that [dad] was at work. “We will carry out a search, because there are partisans in your village!”. They rifled through all the houses and left while making threats, and I was begging God for them never to come back again. They searched the whole village, arrested a few men and have left the punishment [that was supposed to hit our village] in secret.
In the evening dad came back and told us that we had to move to the other side [of the village], because there was the Kamienna river flowing through, which split [the village] into two halves. On the other side there was no danger [for us], as the railway line [was] on our side. The following day we heard a rumor, that the Germans will burn our side of the village with its inhabitants. Then the polish partisans brought [to the police station] a britzka [a type of horse-drawn carriage], in which there were tools used to take the railes to pieces, taken from some platelayer. The gendarmes [listed] the surname, consulted the punishment and passed the case into the hands of Polish police. Our village survived.