Maria Makaruk
Class VI
Wisznice, Włodawa district, Lublin voivodeship
21 June 1946
Memories of the German occupation
1939 was a terrible time because of the German planes, which were destroying Poland. One day, a girl was grazing cows. When the plane came and dropped a bomb on the bridge, the shrapnel hit her in the head so hard that it fell off. [People] came to the rescue, but [the girl] was already dead.
The next year, when the Germans were here, there was also a similar story to the previous one. When Sunday came, one girl was going to church with her friends. She wanted to go to the other side of the road, but she didn’t make it, as a German tank came and killed her.
In 1944, when the Germans left Poland and started to drive away in columns and set up in fields, dad told us to go to the forest, saying that it was safer there. When we went near the forest, we saw people running away because they said they were arresting people there. We spent some time there, [then] I went home so that nobody would take our horse, because they were stealing them. When I set out on my way, I was a bit horrified, because there were cannon balls flying over my head. I came home, we got our younger sister and didn’t come back, because they were firing heavily, [so] we couldn’t leave. We had to spend the night there. We went to sleep, [but] we were awakened by a terrible bang that burst into flames. When we got up in the morning, we saw the cars burning and nobody was in sight. And when we went home, we saw the Soviet soldiers who gave us freedom.