KAZIMIERZ BORYSIUK

Kazimierz Borysiuk
Class 6
Wisznice, Włodawa district, Lublin voivodeship
21 June 1946

Memories of the German occupation

As soon as the Germans occupied Poland, they said that they were bringing good and well-being to the Polish people, but then they started becoming worse and worse. They started taking people to Germany for forced labor, imposing crop quotas and various unbearable obligations, and for the slightest disobedience they beat a lot of innocent people; they shot them and took them to concentration camps, including the infamous Majdanek camp, where they burned people in ovens. They forbade teaching history and geography in schools.

But the Poles did not stop fighting for the freedom of their country. They fought not only at home, but also abroad, hand in hand with the allied powers, with whom the Poles won great and famous victories.

When the front started to approach Poland, the Germans started getting even worse. They would come to the village, beat people, kill people, burn buildings, take grain, so that people would be left without as much as a piece of bread to their name.

Finally, in 1944, a joyful moment came for Poles, as the Germans were driven away by our allies. When the Germans came to our village at night, all the people grabbed their belongings and ran away if they could. They thought that [the Germans] would burn the village down, but thankfully they did not have time to stop because they were being pushed hard by our allies. When the Germans left, their armies were followed by the tanks of our allies from the east, which brought us a free and independent Poland.

Germany is the worst enemy of Poland.