Jan Pawelec
Class 6
Public Elementary School in Maziarze
Iłża district
16 November 1946
Memories of German crimes
What interested me the most was how one time a lot of Germans were driving along the road to the woods. Curious people looked out and asked where they were going and why. Soon, we saw smoke curling up above the woods. It was burning! The Germans drove to the village surrounded by the forest, called Piotrowe Pole. They took all the men, tied their hands and ordered them to keep them up. They burnt down the village. Clothes and sheets were thrown into the fire, mothers and children were left unattended. Only two men remained from the entire village; they survived by dressing up as women. The Germans took the cattle and people and herded them towards Sienno. People collapsed as they went and fell to the ground, while the Nazis beat them with the butts of their weapons and hounded them to [illegible] in Sienno. The Germans beat and interrogated them there, because they wanted to know as much as possible about the partisans. After two weeks, healthy [men] were taken by the Germans for labor in Germany, but as for the rest, nobody knew where they were. Only when the Russians forced the Germans out did people start looking for their loved ones. Then one man reported he saw Germans burying something at night and in the morning there was fresh soil on the ground. The missing people’s families started digging [there]. Eventually, they found bodies [of their relatives]. As people said, they had not simply been shot, but murdered; because they had broken arms, fingers and legs, also the corpses were as black as coal. All the murdered people were exhumed. There were 16 bodies in one hole. The families took the bodies of their relatives, put them into coffins and laid them to rest at the cemetery in Iłża.