22 June 1946
August Romanowicz
Class 6
Wisznice, Włodawa district, Lublin voivodeship
Memories of the German occupation
During the German occupation, there were some dangerous moments, which are now stuck in my memory. As soon as the Germans came here, they mistreated the populace. They went to villages and searched people’s homes looking for weapons and other military things. And then they killed one resident of Wisznice.
Then they got more and more dangerous. They shot people or took them to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka and other prisons, and they treated the people badly until the Red Army came from the east and liberated us.
One day, we saw the glow of burning villages in the east, so I started digging a shelter with dad. A few days later, the columns of Hungarians – allied with Germany – arrived. Then we saw cars full of German troops. One day, the Germans set up their cannons nearby. In the evening, they loaded up and ran away. At midnight we heard the explosion, in the morning it turned out that it was a German tank, which drove over a German mine that had been left on the road by routing soldiers. It was calm from midnight to the morning. At 5:00 a.m. we saw a Soviet patrol. We were glad that our liberators finally came.