Class 7
Primary school no. 1 in Łuków
Łuków, 25 June 1946
The German invasion of Poland in 1939
It is a beautiful autumn day. The streets are full of terrified people with bags in their hands. Everyone is going to a nearby village or to a shelter crying ominously: “The Germans are coming!” The streets slowly empty, the shouting quietens, only the threatening growl of the German planes can be heard. They are flying over already.
Suddenly the first bomb explodes, then the second, then the third. Clouds of dust lift into the air, there is mayhem. Everything feels dread. The cattle, moaning, run as fast as they can into the barn. There is a farmer in the field who has abandoned his horse. He is hiding, and the horse, ploughing the earth, flees the great danger. A horse without a driver runs down the street. The whole town is in flames, overcome with terror and fear. The ground shakes with the explosions of bombs and the collapsing of the tenement buildings. Bursts of machine gun fire cut through the fire and smoke. But the Germans don’t stop [playing] that hellish music.
Night falls. Everything is quiet, but the town is still burning. The bravest among those who managed to save themselves leave their shelters to see what is going on, if the Germans are already here. Shadows holding things in their hands run across the street. It’s them. Individual shots can be heard, people hurry to hide, and look, here they come. There is a terrible moaning. Suddenly, all Hell breaks loose, and now the moaning of the wounded and the dying can no longer be heard, now there is only the roar of the German planes and the deafening booming of bombs. That goes on until dawn.
Now the first deadly, hateful German patrols are coming like demons. Smoke rises above the town. There are no Polish soldiers left in the town, only corpses. There is nobody on the streets, only German patrols. Suddenly, the ground starts to rumble. It is the Germans driving in on their tanks, welcomed with hate. They come in joyfully, smiling with their victory. [Flags with] hooked Swastikas and black eagles fly from their tanks. The cavalry and infantry come in behind the tanks.
Starving and exhausted people come out from the shelters. Seeing this, the Germans drag people out of their hiding places, chasing them off in an unknown direction. How many were killed with a rifle butt, how many died a martyr’s death. That was how they took their revenge on the defenceless people.
A penal company arrived. Now it is like in Hell. They arrest priests, teachers and other people. The town’s residents, starving because of the bombings, no longer have peace. Whoever was able to escape that Hell survived. It was like that for the first few days, then it calmed down. People returned to the ruins on which their homes had once stood.
Now the Germans were slowly starting to arrest people. Some people signed up to be Volksdeutscher and informed on secret organisations. The Germans started to arrest more and more people and transport them to Majdanek, where they were murdered.
Some people created secret organisations to pacify our homeland, but there were also spies who gave them up to the Germans. Some set up partisan groups and they came together to start an uprising. There were lots of spies, especially in the schools. The teachers were not allowed to teach geography or Polish history and we children had to learn in hiding. There were fewer and fewer teachers of geography and Polish history. We weren’t allow to keep books at school or at home, and we weren’t allowed to study from books. We studied from so-called “Stery” [magazines for schools issued by the Germans], because the Germans burned the books.
They went around the villages demanding contingents, and [if] someone didn’t give them on time or [gave] less than they had been ordered to, [then the Germans] would come back to the village unexpectedly a few days later, usually at night, and pull people half-naked and half-asleep from their beds and shove them into trucks with their machine guns. Whoever resisted was put somewhere and killed without pardon. Later, they put people in the town jail and after few days took them to Majdanek or other execution sites. When they had taken someone where they wanted him, they would beat and torture that person until he slandered somebody and made up some crime that person had committed. That was how more and more people were taken away one by one.
But an end to it all started to appear. Larger units of the People’s Army were formed which would acquire weapons by fighting the enemy. Those units began to feel more at home in their own country, even though we were under the control of the heavy hand of Poland’s eternal enemy. More and more often we heard about attacks on German military units. More and more often we heard about German military transports being blown up. More and more loudly people spoke about prisoners being liberated from prison by the People’s Army. More and more partisan groups were formed. Until finally, those atrocities came to an end. [The Germans] left Poland, leaving only rubble and heaps of corpses behind.