The video was recorded by the Pilecki Institute as part of the “Witnesses to the Age” project.
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Our today’s interviewee:
Stanisław Koszewski (born 1936), a poet and author of epigrams from Suchawa near Włodawa. He recalls the period of World War II from the perspective of a Polish resident of a village inhabited mostly by Ukrainians. The Soviets took over the Włodawa region in 1939, but later withdrew and the area up to the Bug River was occupied by the Germans. During the September campaign, the local Ukrainians killed two officer of the Polish army. Later on, Soviet partisans murdered the German land commissar from Włodawa. In retaliation, the occupiers arrested 100 hostages, including Stanisław Koszewski’s father. Every tenth prisoner was to be shot, but they were ultimately saved by Willy Selinger, the German commandant of the labor camp in Adampol, who managed to explain to the German authorities that the men were in fact the land commissar’s workers. The prisoners were not executed, but imprisoned at the Majdanek camp for several months instead, and eventually released. The Ukrainian nationalists became active in 1943. Stanisław Koszewski’s neighbor, a young boy, told him that the Poles would be killed. Koszewski passed on this information to his father. He contacted the boy’s father, who punished the young Ukrainian with a beating. A while later, a group of armed Ukrainian nationalists came to the Koszewski family’s house, planning to attack them. The young neighbor’s father - formally a communist - was among them. The Koszewskis were saved by the Polish partisans who were in the area. They threatened the Ukrainian nationalists to burn the whole village down if the Polish residents were to be harmed.
Copyright by Instytut Solidarności i Męstwa im. Witolda Pileckiego.
28 сен 2021
