Tag #157504 - Interview #100414 (Michal Warzager)

Most of my family died during the war. That Janek Grygorczuk hid them – he was such a good man, he helped us so much. He knew what would happen if he got caught, and he did it anyway. He lived in Szotyski. My relatives worked with him to build a dugout there, and that’s where they hid. It was out of the way – there wasn’t even a road there, just a sort of path between the fields. They stayed in that dugout part of the time, and part of the time at home. And they might have kept safe until the end of the war, because it was already 1942, which was the worst year for the Germans – they were losing everywhere by then – but someone turned them in to the Gestapo. It was a Pole who did it – I even know his name: Stanislaw Kowalski. He’d had his eye on us for a long time, even before I was born. It was something to do with sewing, and he had it in for my father. And he went to another village, called Kamien, where the Gestapo were, and drove them back hidden under sacks of flour. By a stroke of fate, my parents had something they needed to do, and had come to the house. They’d already spent the night there a few times – they made sure first that it was safe – and they were there then. Kowalski must have been watching them, because he knew they were there. And the Gestapo shot everyone with machine guns.

My youngest brother, Matys, had been hiding at a neighbor’s house – a German communist – grazing his cows. And sometimes he went home for dinner. And he was on his way home then too, but he saw what was happening and started to run away. And he would have made it to a hiding place – he was just a few steps from the woods – but he didn’t make it; they shot him. I don’t know where they are buried.