class 6a
Sławatycze, 14.06.1946
My experiences during the War
I lived through the War, and it was a very terrible time. One morning in 1941 when I had just got up I looked through the window and saw a lot of Germans walking from house to house and taking people, mainly men. My Father was also taken at the time and led, with a machine gun trained on him, to the school sports field. Then I, pitying my Father, ran behind the group and saw them taking him to the sports field and putting him in a row with some others. But after a few hours these men were let go and told not to go to the village at night.
I somehow managed to live through that year and the next. But in 1943, early on in the year, when my Father sent me to the barn to fetch some straw, I saw that something was peering out from the sheaf – a human head. At first I did not pay much attention to it and simply grabbed the sheaf, but suddenly a man rose up in front of me. I was so scared that I cried out and instinctively jumped down onto the dirt floor, but my Father caught me while I was falling and saved me from certain death. Then three Soviets came into the barn, asking for something to eat. We let them eat their fill, and later they left for the forest.
In the summer of 1944 I was grazing cows in the forest when I saw a plane fly overhead. I ran out into the meadow to see what kind of plane it was. As soon as I ran out of the forest, the plane descended and started firing its machine guns. Since I had nowhere to hide, I ran back into the forest, but it continued shooting. I hid under a tree stump, and the plane dropped a bomb, but luckily it fell a dozen or so meters away and didn’t hit the stump. I was so terrified that I ran back home, leaving the cows behind; I didn’t go back to get them, my older brother did. This is what I experienced during the War. Because of the War I’m now scared of planes.