Zofia Cybulska
Class 6
Łuków, 24 June 1946
My wartime experiences
The first war that I remember well was the one in 1944. On 23 July 1944, the streets of Łuków were filled with cars and tanks carrying soldiers – the German troops, frantically running away as the Soviet army marched behind them, taking each town under their rule and care. The Germans were fleeing as fast as they could, the whole town had been taken over by the Soviet troops. The Germans didn’t want to leave their possessions behind, so they tried to stop the advancing Red Army by attacking them day and night with planes, and destroying cities with bombs.
We couldn’t take it anymore, so we ran away to survive. As we were running, I saw the flames and smoke consuming the whole town, but our house was still standing. When we were fleeing towards the village of Łazy after an air raid, I went to the field and saw that the entire town was on fire. From a distance, it even seemed to me that I could see our house burning.
On the following day we ran even farther away from the town. We stayed there for a couple of weeks and returned after all the air raids had stopped. When we came back, I couldn’t recognize my town – only chimneys remained standing. Grenades, bombs, burned and damaged tanks and cannons were lying on the roads. Soldiers and civilians had been killed, horses and cows were lying on [fragment missing].