European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

He left the window.

I thought he surely would come around and enter on the other side.

Or that he had gone off to report to his unit to have them come and finish us off.

But he never did show up, nor did any other Germans. The silence was deathlike.

A quarter of an hour later the Germans withdrew from the village and all the women came running, all the mothers.

The horror that ruled is beyond words. The mothers were sure that we had all had been massacred in the school.

They came in to find us alive and well.

Apparently, that German took pity on those children. Earlier that morning the Germans had killed off the wounded.

Having to massacre the children as well would have been, presumably, too much even for him.

So even among the enemy, wearing the SS insignia, there were some who were not brutal beasts.

There were those who were just swept up into the current of the times and they killed merely because that’s how it was.

Activities in the partisan movement

At the time and place, the frame of mind was perfectly idyllic:

the responsibility, not only as one regards one’s own behavior, but also towards one’s comrades.

If a comrade was wounded, you would rescue him.

Even if he fell, you would rescue his body so that the enemy wouldn’t get him and desecrate his body.

It was a matter of honor; you would not hesitate to risk your own life.

Once I dragged a fatally wounded comrade almost three kilometers.

Luckily, the Germans knew that a Partisan brigade was somewhere in the vicinity,

so they chose not to hunt me down directly but tracked me through the shooting lines.