The interview was recorded by the PILECKI INSTITUTE as part of the WITNESSES TO THE AGE project.
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Our today’s interviewee:
Eugenia Perzyna (born 1932), inhabitant of the village of Sobota near Łowicz, in the years 1939-1945 located near the border between the General Government and the Third Reich. The village was inhabited by several German families who had friendly relations with their Polish neighbors. During the Battle of Bzura, when the village was temporarily taken over by Poles, the soldiers wanted to shoot all of the local Germans. Eugenia Perzyna’s mother shielded them with her own body, as she had been on good terms with them for years. One of her German neighbors had a dilemma of her own: one of her sons fought in the Polish army and the other - in the German army. In the spring of 1940, the Germans designated many men from the village to go to Germany for forced labor. Among those men was Eugenia’s father. He and the other men hid in the forest to avoid being sent away. The Germans took the women instead - Eugenia’s mother spent a month at a detention facility in Łowicz. Among the people who organized the roundup was a German man named Zygmunt, who was friends with Eugenia’s father before the war. Now he was no longer friendly - he even tried to beat up little Eugenia, but a German neighbor by the name of Braun defended her. Luckily, the women from Sobota returned to their homes. One day, Eugenia’s mother decided to go and attempt to smuggle good between the General Government and the Third Reich. She was caught by the German gendarmes, but luckily she managed to escape and hide in a nearby barn under a washtub. During the occupation, there were also some comical misunderstandings. One day, Eugenia’s grandfather came home late and started banging on the door and calling out for “Adam”. As he wasn’t speaking very clearly, the relatives inside the house misheard him, thought he was shouting “jadą” [they’re coming] and promptly fled to the forest. Luckily, this was a false alarm.
Copyright by Instytut Solidarności i Męstwa im. Witolda Pileckiego.
5 сен 2024
