19 June 1946
Lucyna Romaniuk
Class 5b
Wisznice, Włodawa district
My wartime experiences
In 1939 there was a war with Germany. The Germans [are] the worst enemies of Poles. They would catch people and force them to work, shoot them to death, and destroy them in many different ways. People had to work in the sawmill, and the Germans even shot 30 innocent people one day.
In 1944, when the war started, I ran away to my uncle who lived near the forest. During my trip, the shells [were] falling, and there were loud explosions. I was walking in the field, carrying a large bag of clothes and a smaller one with food in my hand. It was already night. The shells kept flying, we went to the trench and stayed there for a long time, and the shells above us passed with a whistling noise.
Then we left and went to sleep in the barn. It was a good night’s sleep and when the morning came, they stopped shooting so much. In the afternoon I saw a fire and thought that this could be our house. Some time later, a pile of straw caught fire.
I saw the Germans fleeing along the road to Curyn. They drove cars, tanks and fled in taxis for a long time, some ran on foot. When I went home, I saw land mines left on the road, and craters made by shells in the fields.