Class 6
Łuków, 24 June 1946
My wartime experiences
The Polish and Soviet armies entered Łuków on 23 July 1944. I went to Łazy with my family, where we thought it would be safer. However, it was just like in Łuków. My uncle took us to Aleksandrów the next day. From Aleksandrów we could see planes circling over Łuków and the ground shuddering from bombs.
The days were terrible, but the nights were even worse. Planes were still flying over villages and towns. They fired from machine guns over the villages, trying to set fire to the crops. The crops didn’t burn very easily because they were wet.
On Thursday, my uncle who had been wounded with a mine was brought to us – there were no doctors in Łuków because they had come out to the country. There was a nurse in Wagram, so my uncle was taken along with several other wounded and my dad looked after [them] there while the nurse dressed the wounds. Several weeks passed like that. When we returned, I couldn’t believe that it was Łuków.
There was a person in Wagram who was missing a leg and who didn’t have any family with him because the Germans had taken him to work in Brześć and were going to take him further, but the road was blocked by the Soviet army, the Germans were killed and he was left without anyone to care for him. He had nowhere to go, so we took him in and he stayed with us for a year before he found his family and his family took him.
Those are my wartime experiences.