MARIAN BOGDANOWICZ

Class 7
Primary school no. 1 in Łuków

The German invasion of Poland

The German-Polish war broke out on 1 September 1939. It was a beautiful September morning and there was indescribable activity in the streets. Everyone had the word “war” on their lips, but everyone was expecting victory. Nobody ever considered that Germany, the eternal enemy of Poland, would win.

Unfortunately, those hopes in Poland were misplaced. Germany’s central spy office was able to put spies in the general staff’s main institutions and tear out all of their military secrets. The armored German vanguard broke through the front line and charged forwards unstoppably. German planes bombarded Polish soil, destroying railway lines, barracks, and storage depots, and burning villages and towns. The sirens sounded the alarm in their monotonous, terrifying wail. People fled chaotically to shelters and into the countryside.

The Polish army was still defending itself, but after a few weeks of resistance, fighting an enemy with superior strength, it succumbed. Towns and villages burned. Streets were littered with corpses and the wounded crying for help. Poland was unable to stand up to two powers.

The Germans came into Poland in tanks, armored vehicles and on motorcycles, killing children, women and men. The occupiers forced their government on us and started to arrest and deport Poles to Germany en masse. They rounded up Poland’s youth and took them off to Prussia to work the fields. The Germans annexed Poland’s western cities into the Reich. They set up concentration camps like Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, and took Poles there on mass transports to be killed and incinerated in crematory ovens.

In 1941, the Germans severed their alliance and invaded Russia. In 1940 and 1941, numerous partisan units were established and attacked the Germans, blew up bridges and trains carrying ammunition and food, thereby making the Germans’ transport and further victory more difficult. The Germans seized huge contingents of grain and meat. The invaders hunted down Poland’s youth and [organized] penal expeditions in an attempt to eradicate and Germanize Poles as much as possible.

They began with the Jews, ordering them to give up furs and gold, forbidding them to live freely, imprisoning them in ghettos. Then they carried them off to Treblinka where they killed and incinerated them in ovens. The Germans turned people into soap, artificial fertilizers, centralina [probably a mixture for fattening pigs], and made a huge profit on them. That enslavement lasted five years, and only in 1944 did the Soviet army and the newly- established Polish army release us from the predatory grip of the German hydra.