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128 Out of the Inferno sugarbeet to the refinery, so we made our way there. There someone tended my wound, and I stayed until my mother, who had found out where I was, came to fetch me. After the war, Milewski and his mother fled Poland. They went to England in 1947, where he eventually became the head archivist of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum. ANNAORSKA I was walking along the street in Warsaw with some friends in November 1943 when I was caught in a lapankn (roundup). I was nineteen years old. One moment everything was calm, the next moment there were piercing whistles on all sides, voices calling in Polish to take cover. But it was too late. I ended up in a labor camp at Buk6w. There were Poles, Italians, and Russians there. The Italians were treated abominably. One officer who had tried to escape was kept immersed in water up to his armpits. I used to take him food. One of the most memorable events of my life occurred in 1944, when the Germans started to be more careful with their ammunition. We were still at Buk6w. Shortly before the Warsaw Uprising, the camp was transferred to the vicinity of Wadowice, to an estate belonging to the Szczerbiowski family, and then, after the uprising had started, to the Sudetenland. At Buk6w, the street was visible from the camp. One day I saw a woman crossing the road leading a small child by the hand. Suddenly an SS-man went up to her, grabbed the child, and threw it against a wall, killing it instantly. He shouted, "We have saved a bullet!" I could not forget that sight for many years afterwards. Another event that has stayed in my mind involved the camp commandant , Sonderfiihrer Erich Steinman. One day there was a roll call. We all wondered whether the uprising had started, because normally roll calls were held only if there had been some German military success. As we waited, Steinman drove into the camp in his Opel and showed off the dead body of a woman who had been shot and tied on the car's bumper. She had been a very beautiful dark-haired Jewish woman, dressed in a superb navy blue georgette dress. I had 129 Halina Ostrowska never seen a dress like that worn on the street; it was so beautiful. Still, Steinman was not as bad as his deputy, Jeschke, who could be merciless. On the other hand, the camp doctor, Dressler, who was an Austrian, helped everyone a great deal. Toward the end of 1943 but before I was taken to the camp at Buk6w, I was walking along with a friend, Mrs. Kazimierczyk, near Treblinka. She said she wanted to show me something. Suddenly she said, "Look!" But I had already seen. The ground was literally moving, although the mass graves had been covered over. The story was that only one person out of every four was shot. The rest of the victims were buried alive in the graves and could not get out. The end of the war found Orska in a German camp near Prague. Like so many other Poles, she made her way to the Polish Second Corps in Italy and was evacuated to England in 1946. She attended college, married, and later worked for British Caledonia Airways.She is now retired. HALINA OSTROWSKA I was born in Piftsk, where my father was the headmaster of a high school. He came from Podhorce, east of Lw6w. After his arrest by the NKVD on March 23, 1940, my mother, grandmother, and I decided to go to Podhorce. The journey took us about a week, traveling dressed as peasants. Unfortunately, my father's family could not put us up, as our presence would have been dangerous for them. So we lived the best we could, hiding during the day in stables and barns. During the summer months we hid in the forest, going to friends at night to eat and to wash. Conditions were appalling. We lived this way for nearly two years, until the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. We had spent the night before the German attack in a barn on a hill, its rear entrance hidden by a ravine and the forest. From the front entrance we saw fires and explosions in the vicinity of the main Lw6w-Kiev highway through Brody, which had been built by Polish prisoners of war...

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