European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Within half an hour 125 men were killed.

I bear personal grudges towards the commander that he had not given the order at least an hour earlier.

After all he knew there were no phones so the orders had to be carried out on foot.

And often you couldn’t carry them out, because you ran up into a patrol or something.

So you send not just one messenger, but a few.

That is how it ended. That is why the regiment got disbanded.

Either we got through to Warsaw on our own or to the Kampinos Forest.

When this order to disband reached us, my commander and friend, cadet ‘Witold’ wanted to shoot himself.

Lieutenant ‘Andrzej’, the commander of this company grabbed his sten,

I took him by the hands and told him: ‘What, have you gone mad, cadet?!

The war is just beginning and you want to commit suicide?!

There will still be chances for you to get shot five times!’

So he stayed. He died later on. He never returned from guerrilla fighting.

Tadeusz’s brother: tasks, actions, death

My brother had this job in the intelligence.

Mainly he was about pursuing informers who might have harmed Poles.

My brother did not tell me what it looked like,

but I knew when he was directed to execute an informer with whom he was in touch through trading in the ghetto.

This informer, they said, was trading furs and the like.

Since the Jews were selling all their valuables.