Class 7
Primary school no. 1 in Łuków
Łuków, 25 June 1946
The German invasion of Poland in 1939
The summer days are beautiful, the sun is shining brightly in the clear blue sky. The farmers are working in the fields, preparing the land for crops. In the evenings, people gather in the streets to talk about the war that is soon supposed to break out with our enemy from the west. New news comes every day, saying that the whole German army is just waiting for orders from Hitler, the chancellor of the whole of Germany. People are talking amongst themselves and speaking of a great and inevitable war with Germany.
Finally, on 1 September 1939, Germans invaded Poland in a barbaric way. The whole nation, having found out about the war, is anxious. Until one fateful September day, when we hear the roar of planes. Everyone’s first though was that it might be our planes. But they were not ours. After a few minutes we saw two squadrons moving slowly through the clear sky. A few moments later, a horribly powerful booming started to rip through the air. The German planes flying above began their concert. Nothing could be heard at first, then a constant booming, and a terrible cloud of dust rose up.
We could hear the explosion of bombs and the shots fired from machine guns and artillery by our soldiers. Somewhere near the forest, a horse startled by the booming of the exploding bombs takes off like mad and its owner hides wherever he can. A herd of terrified cattle races mooing down the road towards town in the uproar. The crying of mothers, the shouting of children mixes with the exploding bombs. Smoke starts to rise from burning houses.
Finally, that hellish music stops. The planes have flown away. People come out from their hiding places, thanking God for saving and taking care of them. Everyone goes to see how much damage the German planes have done. There are corpses on the street, collapsed walls of buildings, slaughtered horses and cows, abandoned carts and various broken things. The moaning of the wounded can be heard. People look into the craters left by the German bombs. Everyone is talking about how they managed to hide as they fled the town.
There is a great restlessness in the town and in the countryside, terror, the tears of mothers for their murdered children. “What do we do now?” one asks another. Some say to take all their possessions and flee to a safe place in the countryside or in the forests.
Refugees are coming from the west, telling of the war with the Germans on the border. Terrible fear prevails among the whole frightened Polish nation. We even receive the news that our army could not withstand the attack by the horrible German army and that all the German forces were entering our country. Everyone’s heart skipped a beat, blood froze in their veins and their legs trembled with fear. People leave the cities and escape to the villages and nearby forests.
The terrible news comes that the German forces are approaching. The planes were still flying, but they were bombing Poland less. Nobody knew what to do to save their own lives. The military and civilians fled as one, not knowing where or where to, sowing fear of the approaching Germans all around. All of the refugees fled in spite of cold and hunger, just to get further away.
Even though I was young, I came home with the news that the Germans had already reached Stoczek. I was small, but I understood what German meant. Anxiety and fear overcame me at the word “German”.
A week later they were in Łuków. People ran to their hiding places when the German motorized military units appeared in the streets, and most [of the residents] of the town abandoned their property. The enemy went up and down the streets shooting civilians, bodies fell. Corpses lay in the streets for several days because people were afraid to go back to the town. The Germans went from house to house, asking about guns, radios, bicycles and motorcycles, and they were taken away from anyone who admitted they had them as if they already belonged to the Germans.
After a month of the war against Germany, all Poland was put under the cruel rule of Hitler and his government. The people who had fled from the Germans came back to their homes, not knowing whether they were returning for life or death.
The German occupiers ruled our land from September 1939 to July 1944. Over the course of those five years, contingents for grain and meat were placed on the farmers and all industry and trade was suspended. Difficult times came for every Pole. After the Germans arrived, our German colonists signed up for the Gestapo and took part in the murder of the innocent Polish people. The Germans carried everything from Poland back to their country, for example grain, fat, all kinds of produce, goods and wood. The Polish people suffered horribly under that enslavement from lack of food which the Germans took from us.
The Polish youth was rounded up and deported to Germany for hard labor in the factories and on the farms. Many people signed the Volksliste. They were traitors and spies. The Germans issued fierce orders to the Polish people and everyone had to carry them out like a slave under pain of death.
The Poles who could not adapt to the German rules were arrested for the smallest incursion and taken to the concentration camps the Germans had set up on Polish lands like Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka and Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Dachau and many others in Germany. Teachers and the intelligentsia were taken to those camps. People were tortured there in the most horrible way, for example they were starved, given work beyond the bounds of strength, frozen and even poisoned with Zyklon gas and incinerated in crematoria after their deaths. That was how several million Poles died, and whoever survived and came back from the camp was no longer healthy and was not strong enough to work.
Those atrocities lasted around five years in Poland and finished in 1944. In 1944, as the result of a successful invasion by the Anglo-Saxons, the eastern powers and the Polish forces, Poland was liberated from Hitlerite barbarism once and for all. In the afternoon of Sunday 22 July 1944, we saw the Germans fleeing Łuków without their helmets or their weapons, but they got their revenge on Monday, because Łuków remains in ruins to this day. That was the revenge of the Germans, our eternal enemy. There were also difficult times in Warsaw, our capital. The enemy destroyed the whole city in revenge for the Uprising, leaving only a pile of rubble behind.
Today, Poland has risen once more and is starting to develop, striving towards prosperity in a free and independent country. And what happened to the Germans? They definitely will not lift their heads from their ruins ever again.