Tag #108695 - Interview #77989 (Janina Duda)

This year, 1939, was a horrible one. As you traveled from west to east – dead horses, human bodies, mooing cows that hadn’t been milked, destroyed houses, fallen trees, crying people and us, in the middle of everything, without food, in prison ‘kabats’ [‘jacket’, word of Hungarian origin]. When we reached a country estate and asked for milk, bread, potatoes, they gave it all to us. The squire gave it to us. But he separated us from his people, the farm-hands. And what were we in for? We said – for strikes. Well, what were we to say, for communism? He separated us immediately anyway.

On 15th September [1939] I reached Warsaw, via Bielany. There was heavy gunfire.