Maria Krokowska

"When my mum was released from the NKVD she was told to come and see the policeman every month to report on things she saw or heard in the town. Thus we had some unofficial procedure at home that we carried out at the end of every month when the NKVD were supposed to come. Either I locked mum at home while I was walking around the town being elusive, or she left home and was walking around as long as I let her know it was fine, that they left. A man from NKVD was coming ( he was called – public prosecutor – but it wasn’t the function as we know it now) and asked about her. Whatever happened she never said a word. That would be ridiculous. It lasted a month, the second one and third… Then my mum said – “ My child I can’t bear it any more, I just can’t stand it. We must do something about it”. It turned out that some colonel had an eye on our house. He said – “ I can arrange some accommodation for you but in exchange, I take your house”. He moved to our house but found something where we could stay. Indeed, he arranged a kind of coach and we and other family left the town. In Tarnopol we were attached to another transport. Mum was a nervous wreck. It was just unbearable – to hide every single month and pretend she wasn’t there. No, it couldn’t last too long…"

" We saw how the Czortków prison looked like when the Soviets left and the Germans came. Firstly, they had difficulty in opening it because the gate was propped up with beams. They had to jump over the wall and it wasn’t so easy. Finally the Germans opened the prison and said to us – “Go ahead people, come in!”. When the Soviets took the prison over from the Poles, according to their custom, they put the speakers on the four corners of the prison wall and played music 24 hours a day. Thus whatever happened inside we never knew. Even if somebody shouted through the window, we weren’t able to hear anything. What turned out to be that – there was nobody inside. There was no living soul here! No man. „Where are the prisoners?” – we were asking. However we knew there were hundreds of people! From then on they went down to the basement. They found a dead guard and started to excavate. They went upstairs and it turned out there were rooms top to bottom full of parcels. Parcels that people sent for prisoners. Everything was stored there and the prisoners got nothing. Thus Germans started to dig up more and more. The courtyard and basements were full of bodies in various conditions. The German employed Jews, ( -Forgive me God but they deserved it, there were the firsts that appeared in the NKVD!- ), so the Jews were digging and searching. After that, the burials were arranged. It was summer –heat! July and August – extremely heat. They had no coffins so the bodies were put in some kind of boxes made from wood, covered with lime ( in emergency of plaque). And all of this was buried behind the cemetery. The Jews kept on digging and searching".