Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939-44 PDF
Preview Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939-44
Diary from the Years of Occupation, 1939-44 Nish army captain Dr. Zygmunt Kiukowski and his son George, 1920. D ia ry from the Years o f Occupation 1939-44 Zygmunt Klukowski Translated from Polish by George Klukowski Edited by Andrew Klukowski and Helen Klukowski May foreword by Monty Noam Fenkower University of Illinois Press Urbana and Chicago O 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Manufactured in the United States of America C 5 4 3 2 I This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatk>n Data Klukowski, Zygmunt, 1885-1959. [Dziennik z lac okupacji zamojszczyzny, 1939-1944. English] Diary from the years of occupation, 1939-1944 / Zygmunt Klukowski ; translated by George Klukowski ; edited by Andrew Klukowski and Helen Klukowski May ; foreword by Monty Noam fenkower. p. cm. Translation of: Dziennik z lat okupacji zamojszczyzny, 1939-1944. Includes index. ISBN 0-252-01960-1 (acid-free paper) I. World Wir, 1939-1945—Nand—Zamość (Ybivodeship) 2. Klukowski, Zygmunt, 1885-1959—Diaries. 3. World Wir, 1939-1945— Personal narratives, Nish. 4. Zamość (Nand: Voivodeship)— History. I. Title. D802.P62Z3413 1993 940.5 3'4384'092—dc20 [B] 92-11032 C1P Contents Foreword: The Klukowski Chronicle vii Monty Noam Ptnhower Translator's Note xv Editor's Note xxi Preface 1 1939 The Shock of Dtfeat 3 1940 Life Is Nerve Shattering 61 1941 The List of Casualties Is Growing 131 1942 W ill We Be Evacuated or Maybe Shot 181 1943 We Have Begun to Fight Back 235 1944 The Days of Our Slavery Are Numbered 295 Appendix 355 Index 359 Illustrations follow page 2 Foreword: The Klukowski Chronicle Monty Noam Penkovxr The invasion of Wand by sixty German divisions on September 1, 1939, signaled but the first step in Adolf Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum. According to the Nazi dictator’s geopolitical-racist view, “living space” in eastern Eu rope would provide food and raw materials, achieve territorial continuity, and infuse the nation’s body with new blood. While unleashing World War 11, implementation of this policy in the occupied territories ultimately included the killing of their political and intellectual leadership, the anni hilation of the Jews, the exploitation of the masses through slave labor, and the transfer to Germany of Polish and Slav children who would improve the “Aryan” race. In the mind of Berlin, Wand as a nation had ceased to exist. Quickly annexing parts of western and northern Wand, the Third Reich organized a civil administration, the General Government, in the remaining area al lotted it under the secret Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939. (The Soviets seized eastern Wand up to the Bug and San rivers. Following Germany’s June 1941 invasion of Stalin’s imperium, the district of Galicia was formed and incorporated into the General Government. Expressly marked for murder were Wand’s 3.3 million Jews, 90 percent of whom perished in vin łomoord ghettos, concentration camps, and the death centers of Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Three million other Mes, 10 percent of the nation’s prewar population, died under the swastika. According to official estimates, 2.4 million Mish citizens went through forced labor and deportation to Germany and other occupied countries; 863,000 faced detention in prisons and concentration camps; more than 2.4 million were forced to leave their homes. This Germanization proved exceptionally harsh for the Zamosc prov ince in eastern Mand. The southern part of the Lublin district, a predom inantly agricultural area divided before the war among the four districts of Zamosc, lomaszow Lubelski, Hrubieszów, and Bilgoraz, boasted of some 340,000 Poles, 110,000 Ukrainians, and 60,000 Jews. Beginning in May 1940, several thousand Poles suspected of potential resistance fell victim to the AB-Aktion. Two years later the Jews of the region were deported with horrendous efficiency to the death chambers of Belzec. Then, on Novem ber 12, 1942, SS Reicbsfibrer Heinrich Himmler, Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood and, concurrently, in charge of the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish question," agreed with General Gov ernment director Hans Frank to have this province declared the first reset tlement area. Preliminary preparations included the destruction of six villages and the removal of 2,000 people. The pacification of Zamosc officially began on November 27, 1942, un der the command of Odilo Globocnik, who had almost completed his su pervisory task of murdering the General Government’s Jews in Aktion Reinbard. Some 300 villages were emptied of their population of 110,000. Ten thousand people died in the course of the forced evictions. The sur vivors were transported to Germany for slave labor, dispatched to concen tration camps, shot, or sent to villages in the Lublin and Warsaw districts. More than 30,000 children were handed over to strangers. Some died in Auschwitz or during the deportations, and some were designated for Ger manization in the Reich; German sources list a total of 4,454 such children in foster homes. Four-hundred additional villages escaped the evacuation pilot project, which ended in August 1943, because the SS lacked the req uisite manpower. These events strengthened the Mish resistance movement, operating as an underground state with ties to a govemment-in-exile in London. The singular killing of Zamosc’s Jews and the expulsions of its peasantry led partisan commanders to suspect that the Mes might be next in line for sys tematic death. Struggling for sheer survival, partisans engaged Germans in numerous clashes. The Nazis retaliated by wiping out entire villages as ex amples of collective punishment. Aktion Sturmwind alone deployed three Wehrmacht divisions in June 1944 against 1,100 men from the Armia Kra- Ftnword ix jmoa (Home Army) and the National Democratic party and another 1,000 from the left-wing Feasant party’s PPR and Soviet partisan units. Heavy fighting that same spring between the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Palish resistance resulted in great losses to both sides, and the districts of Hrubieszów and Tomaszów Lubelski were cleared of their inhabitants. The agony of Zamosc ended with the arrival of the Red Army in July 1944, only to be succeeded by another arduous, far longer occupation. Fortunately for the historical record, the tribulations of the Zamosc re gion had their chronicler in Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski. Born the youngest of three children to Dr. Jordan and Felicia (Fodwinski) Klukowski in Odessa on January 23, 188S, Zygmunt completed his high school studies in Mos cow. Enrolling in that city’s University Medical School, he spent a few months in prison for activity in Polish underground organizations during the First Russian Revolution of 190$. After release from jail, Zygmunt moved to Crakow, able to attend its Jagiellionium University School of Medicine. With his degree awarded in 1911, Klukowski secured employ ment as a physician at the Radziwiłł estate in Nies wierz, where he met his future wife, Dr. Helena Wojciechowski. The next few years regularly found Klukowski in uniform. Drafted into the Russian army in September 1914 as a surgeon, he worked briefly in a medical evacuation unit and then in a Moscow military hospital. His wife joined him there in 1915, where their son, Jerzy (George), was bom a year later. Moving all about the country during the Russian revolution, the fam ily finally returned in 1918 to a free Poland. During the Wish-Russian war, Klukowski served as military surgeon in the Polish army, discharged as a captain in 1921 with the Cross of Valor. In October 1919 Zygmunt Klukowski was appointed superintendent of the Zamosc county hospital in Szczebrzeszyn, a post he would hold for almost thirty years. Aside from administrative and medical duties, he taught in the training colleges of Szczebrzeszyn and Zamosc and at the University of Crakow. A passion for Wish history and biography resulted in a unique collection of more than fourteen thousand volumes, which, with a collection of ex libris, he willed to the Catholic University in Lublin. Ever energetic, Klukowski also served as chief of the town’s volunteer fire department, taught history in the local high school for a time, and helped organize the Zamosc city library. In 1930 he obtained a divorce from his wife; a second marriage, to Zofia Szymański, in 1933, resulted in a son, Tadeusz. The outbreak of World War II brought the fifty-five-year-old doctor back to active duty for the White Eagle on a Red Field. Discharged after one month’s work with a military hospital in retreat to the Rumanian bor der, he returned to his former post. During the entire German occupation X Foreword Klukowski served the Armia Krajowa under the code name “ftxlwinski.” His secret tasks included writing down for its information service all that occurred in a 75-100-mile radius and passing along reports from partisan unit to unit. Obsessed by an urge to record notes for a future history of the war in Zamosc and in Poland, he also kept a diary almost on a daily basis, hiding it from the Germans at great risk amid the hospital’s old buildings. Gestapo arrests on more than one occasion, even imprisonment in Za- mosc’s Rotunda prison, did not dampen his resolve. Grim, indeed, for Klukowski was the Soviet occupation that followed the war. Under the code name “Satyr,” he served in the Polish under ground and kept a diary of the Communist terror. Arrests by the NKVD, before and after he testified in case 8 of the International Military Tribunal trials in Nuremberg, led to Klukowski’s demotion to ward physician. Yet he managed to publish five volumes on the German occupation of the Zamosc region and prepared three other manuscripts, subsequently given to the Catholic University of Lublin. In July 1952, while unsuccessfully «eeking to defend his son Tadeusz from execution for partisan activity linked to Operation Martyka, Klukowski himself was sentenced to a ten-year incar ceration term. After four years in Wronki prison, the doctor was pardoned and “rehabilitated.” In June 1956 Klukowski decided to relocate to Lublin, where he spent the remaining years of his life. A first edition of Diary from the Years of Oc cupation was published in Poland in 1958, with a second edition the follow ing year. The book earned him the country’s literary award for the best World War II memoir. This joined the company of other past honors, in cluding the Order of the White Crow from the Polish Bibliographical So ciety, the Cavalier Cross of Polonia Restituta for lifelong devotion to the cause of Wish freedom, and the twice-received Gold Cross of Merit. Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski died on November 23, 1959, after a long strug gle against cancer. Buried in the Szczebrzeszyn cemetery’s special section dedicated to the soldiers of the Home Army, he has not since been entirely forgotten. His name adorns the street passing the hospital he served so faithfully, and in 1986 the townspeople erected a monument in his honor. Its plaque, located in the town square, reads: Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski 1885-1959 Physician, Bibliophile, Historian, Writer, and Civic Leader Citizens of Szczebrzeszyn Zygmunt Klukowski’s dream that his diary would be translated into both English and French never materialized. Now, more than thirty years
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