It was ’42. I remember well,
it was May, it was a warm month, and there was a
round up of Jews. The Gestapo came from Szczawnica;
that’s where they had their
quarters. The SS were the worst of the worst. They
came to Krościenko with their cars, like army Jeeps,
there were always four of them in them.
‘Raus’
we understand, get out… German was similar to the
Jewish language they used. They knew perfectly well
what was going on so they came out onto Jagiellońska
street. Jagiellońska is the town’s
high street, it links Krościenko with Nowy Targ and
Sącz, it was a main road. They all went out and had
only a few minutes to grab anything they could and
that’s it. The old grand-dads
that couldn’t go on their own
were taken out on wheelchairs, and those who couldn’t
even get out of bed got a bullet and end of story.
It lasted for a whole day. It was terrible. No-one
could help them; they would pay with their lives.
It was all moving in the direction of Nowy Targ,
where there was a separation point, where they would
take the children away from their parents. Babies
would be killed on the spot and kids who could
already walk without any help would go one way,
their parents another. They loaded them all up unto
trucks and took them away to Oświęcim, because
Auschwitz-Birkenau was made up of two camps. It’s
known that they didn’t keep
the children for later, but they would be taken away
to be dealt with, the elders went to the camp.
It was ’42 and they were
exterminating the Jews. There were two Jews, they
were called “mrówki”, ‘ants’,
but to this day I have no idea why. A Jewish woman
was just under 90 and she paid with her life. They
didn’t have the strength to
go, she turned up, no-one around, they shot them
here. They got shot up like my bench, there was a
grass patch where these steps are, trees, a garden,
that house wasn’t there,
three apple trees were cut down where the house is
now. It was not a pleasant sight. They just shot
them and that’s that. Someone
else came to clean up, he came round with a truck,
there must have been two of them, not one of them is
alive today. One was called Plewa, the other I can’t
remember. The truck was called the muck-wagon,
farmers would use it to transport fertilizer for the
potatoes or anything else that needed planting. They
put the bodies on top of it, one by the head, the
other by the legs, and they just just hurled them
on.
When you go to Sącz, on the left-hand side there’s
a Jewish cemetery a little up the hill. |
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