Class 5
Primary school in Białka
My experiences of the occupation and the German war
I lived in the little town of Rokitno. Life there ran smoothly and peacefully.
1939. The outbreak of the war did little to mark itself in my memory. I was seven years old.
Then came 1941, the year in which the Germans took our town. It was in summer. The first German military patrols arrived and were warmly welcomed by the Ukrainian population. That was the first time we saw the Ukrainian forces called the Polissian Sich with the ataman Bulba at its head. It was a small unit, maybe 50 people with no uniforms, generally barefoot and poorly armed. That first Ukrainian corps looked very funny. It was they who welcomed the German patrols with an honorary salvo.
The Germans introduced the Ukrainian language into all the official offices from the outset. Schools were closed. The Germans reigned, conducted searches looking for weapons and took whatever they fancied as they did so.
They established a ghetto for the Jews by fencing off streets with barbed wire and boards. A few months later they shot them at the market square. I remember that tragedy perfectly. The murdered Jews were taken out of town and buried. How terrible it was!
Then they started to deport the younger people for labor in Germany. How many young girls and boys were sent to vagrancy and hunger! How terrible was the grief of the parents when they said goodbye to their children.
To make matters worse, Ukrainian gangs started to be formed in the forests. They attacked the Polish villages. [The Ukrainians] burned and murdered people in a horrible way. They did not have enough guns, so they used axes. People hid at night in the forests with their cattle, their horses and all their possessions. They only came back to work in the village during the day. When night came, they made for the forest come rain, cold or storm.
But even that did not help. [The Ukrainians] came suddenly even when they were least expected, murdering, burning, evening killing babies in their cribs with axes. I remember everyone fleeing to the city. How they carried the corpses of the dead. Horrible! Without their heads, arms and legs. The murdered people were buried in common graves without coffins.
Every day brought something new. Sometimes the glow of fires could be seen on one side, sometimes the wounded and the dead were brought in from the other. The German, our enemy, was happy with our misfortune, with our despair. None of us thought we would make it out of that terrible pogrom. We thought that we too would share the fate of the dead. Thousands of murdered and dead cried up to Heaven for revenge.