Andrzej Fudalej
Class 5b
The most memorable moment from the [time of the] occupation
It was 5 a.m. when my mother’s frightened voice woke me up: “Roundup.” Terrified, I looked out of the window and spotted German soldiers hiding behind the neighboring houses. The faces of the German SS officers soon appeared at the window. A moment later, heavy footfalls belied the soldiers who were entering our home. They were German Wachmannen [guards] who were very hostile to the Poles. The steel bayonets on their rifles glinted menacingly in the light of the rising sun. After a half-hour search, the menfolk were marched in fours to the gathering point. They returned a few hours later, but not all of the men whom the SS had taken from their homes came back. The men they had rounded up were transported in trucks [to prison]. Several months later, those people wrote letters from concentration camps; some [of them] were shot in the prison in Radom.
Today, now that Poland is free once more, the memory of it haunts me like an old nightmare or an old dream. Hardly any of those people came back.