Zofia Janiszewska
Class 4
My memory of German crimes
When the war began, I was a young girl. I didn’t understand what a war was, but something must have been happening because there were cars, tanks, cabs, motorcycles, cannons, and carts on which there was ammunition. German soldiers were walking around. The enemy’s control began. During the occupation, it was hard for us to live. The Germans killed people for no reason.
One day while walking down the street, I noticed a few cars moving toward the station. In these cars were people condemned to be shot. They were sad and scared. Their hands and feet were tied, and their mouths were gagged. [The Germans] shot them outside the train station. I heard machine gun shots. From our yard, we could see the bodies of the murdered people. They were lying in a pile of one on top of another; their white shirts and jackets could be seen. The gendarmes gathered workers and ordered them to dig a hole in the marsh, into which the bodies of those killed were thrown. The ground was trodden down so that there was no trace of where they had been buried. A few days later, we could see from our window a white birch cross stuck on the place of the crime. Children put flowers on the grave of the martyrs.