Henryk Kolbicz
Class 5b
Elementary School in Iłża
Memories of German crimes
The Germans are the biggest criminals in the world. During the six years of occupation we got to know them very well. I can’t forget the moment when they arrested my daddy. I will always remember how the Germans took my uncles to a camp and murdered them there. Not far from my hometown, near the forest, the Germans burned a whole village because Polish partisans were hiding there. The elderly were killed, and babies were thrown into the fire and burned alive. Sometimes the German military police would take people to the castle hill and kill them there. Behind the building they occupied there was a barn that witnessed a lot of horrible murders and executions of Poles. One man was not killed, but got gravely wounded. He crawled across the field, begging to be finished off. There were thousands of such cases. But even scarier than the executions were the corpses hanging on gallows in the streets, left there to spread fear. The Germans staged roundups several times. They surrounded the town with soldiers, grabbed young people from the streets or dragged them out of their homes, put them into cars a took them for labor in Germany. They shot at the fleeing [people]. We lived in fear throughout the whole occupation, because no one was safe.