Aleksandra Łońska
Class 7
Wisznice, 19 June 1946
My most important wartime experience
One of my most terrible wartime experiences happened when the front line crossed Poland and stopped at the Bug river. Cannons sounded and bullets whizzed. The planes growled, making the whole ground shake from the rumbling.
I got up in the morning, I was very scared. Planes were flying, cars driving all the time, the army marching everywhere on the roads. I did not know what was going on. People were walking everywhere in crowds until the planes came. I do not know exactly how many planes there were, I just know there were a lot.
A friend and I ran out of the house to see them, and at that moment the planes began to fight. One was already on fire over the forest. Then the Germans started shooting at them from the forest. The plane turned a somersault in the air and fell to the ground, belching black smoke. It crashed near our house. We could see nothing but smoke, but we heard shooting. The plane was wrecked, there was very little left. Shards of iron and sheet metal landed right by where we standing by the house.
The neighbor’s barn burned down. People flew to the rescue, and there was shooting. They simply lost their heads. The Germans burst out of the forest; one had been killed, another mortally wounded. One pilot jumped out of the plane, but no good – the Germans caught him and shot him. Nobody knows how many people there were in the plane, because everything was torn to shreds.
The next morning, a group of us gathered and we went to see the plane. We walked through a small grove and saw the wing. We looked, and saw a human leg and a piece of an arm. We went and told people, and my uncle went. They made a box and gathered up the body, and buried it. They made a very nice grave; those bodies are resting there still.
That is how I survived in 1943.