Zofia Niedziela
Class 6
[Elementary] School in Aleksandrów
Iłża district
15 November 1946
Memories of German crimes
After the outbreak of the Polish-German war, i.e. after 1939, when the Germans seized the Polish territory, they started committing great murders in towns and villages: they hanged people on the gallows, killed whole families and abused the Polish population in a horrible way. I’m [small?], I’m 11 years old, and I witnessed the crime committed [by the Germans] in our village of Osówka, when on 20 June 1944 they killed an entire family, burned the buildings and threw the mother and children half alive into the fire.
I also saw how the Germans killed a mother in the field and her children in the house: one sleeping in the cradle and the other on the bed. The brains of these children were left on the ceiling and walls, and their blood flowed in streams. The Germans thought it was not enough, so they began to deport great numbers of people to the camps for certain death. The exhausted nation collapsed from hunger, and stronger individuals were finished off in the crematoria. Such are [my] memories of German crimes. Today, thank God, we have freedom and liberty.
My most memorable moment from the occupation
The most memorable moment for me was when the Germans, driven by Polish and Russian troops, fled from Russia and reached our village. Next to our village there is a forest from which partisans fired at the Germans. The latter entered the forest in cars. I was grazing cows in the forest at the time, and the gendarmes started shooting terribly. Those who were in the forest were caught and led to the village for execution. I slowly escaped from the forest to a third village and only returned home in the evening. I was frightened, I was terribly afraid of the Germans. They kept passing by, I thought there would be no end of them. I worried about my parents and brother, about what was happening to them and in our village, as people dispersed in different directions. This was the most memorable day of the occupation for me.