"When the Russians came, they also came to us, into our house. And they said that they were going to live there. We had to leave them the kitchen. They put telephones in the kitchen and moved in. Mum knew a bit of Russian because she’d lived in the East and sewed for the people she lived with. And she would go into the kitchen to cook, I mean the Russian kitchen, with a neighbour. And she sewed clothes for them, tights for horse-riding. She had a pattern for men because she’d been to Tailoring School in Lviv, and she could sew all that."
"In January 1945, KL Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. Those prisoners who were unable to walk stayed in the barrack hospital. A close friend of my father, a doctor from Warsaw whom he had met in the camp, had gangrene and could not walk. Some people from Osiek came and took him as they came to get their beloved from the camp. They took him too. He asked them to contact my father. The contact came through postman Zawisz, who sent greetings to my Dad from Rudolf Diem. My mother and my father’s brother, Władysław went on foot with the children’s sledges to get the doctor. That’s how they transported him. It was a very difficult and long way. Mr Rudolf stayed with us for six months. My father organised medicine for him. Later, his wife came for him and they remained in contact with Dad the whole time. Rudolf Diem was head doctor at the railways in Warsaw. In 1945, English people came to our house, there were ten of them. They had walked from the camp before the arrival of the Russians. They were led by German police who were looking for a place to house them. My family accepted them. Dad brought in blankets and pallets from the neighbours. Mum cooked. They spent three or four days with us. They slept in the tilery where it was warm. They would give us chocolate, I remember. They were waiting for the train. We received greetings from them after the war. My parents burnt the letter as they were afraid of the Department of Security. When the Russians came, my father was arrested by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and spent a month in custody in Bielsko. They also arrested Mum and Mrs Dąbrowicka for collaboration with the Germans (Mum got three people out of the camp – that was suspicious). The NKVD arrested very many people. They sent Mrs Dąbrowicka to a kolkhoz (cooperative farm) in Georgia. Mum was freed after three months. They was no space in the trains. They handed her over to Polish authorities. Her sisters would walk from Kęty to Bielsko to bring her food. They bribed the guards. For a watch it was possible to hand food over to somebody."
Yes, I remember everything. They were all at our place. It was a little wooden house, right. We had comfortable cellars which were under the whole house, there was a bricked-in vault but it was comfortable there. And they were all there in the cellar. The people who had been evicted from Grojec, the Bauers were there, but they were scared to return to their houses as they did not know what would happen. They were all there with their children – a whole cellar full of people, Holy Mother of God! I spent the whole night in the kitchen with the lights off and I could see everything out of the window. To the East was Głębowice, and I saw how the bullets shone, how they flew – I watched all night long. And there were these arches there, and they walked in platoons, one after another. And it was snowing and everyone was in white, Germans dressed in white, Russians in white. I saw an army coming, an army coming, but I didn’t know which. They walked the same road as the Germans, I was observing them: they were carrying machine guns, would stand still, chamber and shoot and then hang the machine gun on their shoulder and again go forward, and again forward… and that’s how it was.”
