Włodzimierz Osych
Class 4b
Public Elementary School
Memories of German crimes
Many horrible things happened during the German occupation. The Germans arrested Poles for the slightest offences, and then deported them to camps or shot them. Many people were killed in the most horrible way at the gendarmerie station in our town of Iłża. They were imprisoned in dark cells, beaten, tortured, deprived of food, abused, and finally led behind the barn and killed. Once the Germans took some men out to the hills and ordered them to dig pits. When they did as ordered, the Germans executed them and threw them into the pit. The Germans also set fire to several villages that were close to the forest because partisans were supposedly hiding there. Some families died in the flames. Once the Germans killed a mother and a father near the forester’s lodge, and when their child was leaving the house, the German threw the child into the fire. When the Germans caught a partisan, they tormented them very much to learn [something] about the others. Such a person was either killed on the spot or deported to a death camp. The same fate befell those who hid or fed partisans or offered them any other assistance or sympathy.