Class 6
Kocudza
My wartime experiences
After the outbreak of the Polish-German war in 1939, a whole mass of people escaping from the Germans and the front in the west drew past our house next to the road. It was interesting. Interesting because we saw people from various parts of Poland who spoke differently – it wasn’t easy to talk to them because they were people from Upper Silesia, from the Poznań area and highlanders from the Tatra mountains. Then the front and the hostile forces came. There was a battle nearby, but it passed us by without a trace. The first years [of the war] didn’t affect us.
The Germans came to us at dawn on 8 July 1943. Their faces and their eyes were strangely horrible, and when they asked about dad and about other peasants, it seemed as if they were going to shoot us all. It was a horrible moment when the Germans took my dad away and we tearfully said goodbye to him. It seemed to us that everything was crying as it had been drizzling since the dawn. Mom and I both experienced some very difficult moments when they moved dad somewhere to torment and maybe even kill him as well. They put dad behind the wire in a camp in Budzyń near Kraśnik. Mom went several times with food, but she wasn’t allowed to visit [dad] or give [him] any food. After six weeks of uncertainty, dad came home.
But my experiences one year later were a hundred times worse, when the German gendarmes took my father, my mother and my brother away from me. My cousin was a commissioner in the Blue Police in Frampol. Following an agreement with the partisans, he fled to the forest with several of his friends. The Germans came the next day in two cars. There were around 30 armed gendarmes and 10 Polish policemen from Biłgoraj. They surrounded our home and took my father, my mother and my brother, [pulling them away] from their work in the fields. They beat my father roughly on his back and his sides with the butts of their rifles to make him say where the commissioner had gone, who had disarmed the police station and who belonged to the underground organization. They ordered my father to stand next to a tree by the road, aimed their guns at him and gave him five minutes to think: either he would answer their questions or they would shoot him. But my father held out and didn’t tell them anything.
Afterward, they took them to Bigoraj for two months of questioning, and from there to Zamość, where they were let go – very exhausted from the beatings, the fear, and the hunger – after three long months of torture.
My mother’s health deteriorated as a result of those terrible experiences in prison and behind the wire. She died after several months of illness in hospitals in Janów and Biłgoraj. Were it not for that terrible enemy the German, she would still be alive.