Sixteen-year-old Polish teenager Edward Niesobski, from the small border town of Ostrów in western Poland, knew war was imminent. As a member of the Polish Scout Movement, which promoted the nation’s independent spirit among the young, Edward had been undergoing regular paramilitary training for months, expecting to defend his country when the time came.
Dawid Sierakowiak recorded his thoughts and experiences in a diary he had started earlier that summer, but Edward Niesobski began to write only on the day of the German invasion itself. While waiting for instructions from his scout leader on the plan of action and his own role, Edward recorded the stark contrast between his romantic image of war and the actual events on the day.
1 September 1939
We’ve been expecting something big to happen all week. People have been gathering in groups all over town, talking; reservists have been called up; soldiers have been confiscating horses and cars. We are not going to let the enemy take us without a fight. Our scout group has been on full alert too. On Wednesday afternoon posters were put up, warning citizens to make sure they’re fully prepared. Mobilization began on Thursday. My mother and siblings have already left the city, but I’m staying here with my dad. A siren went off at about 5 a.m. this morning; then came the air raids. It has started. The Germans are trying to take over our Poznań province, Silesia and Pomerania. The whole country is rising up as one today to fight them.
German planes are circling in the sky like black hawks. Their drone is the voice of death. This morning I saw large groups of people crossing over from the other side of the border. They said they’d been attacked last night by their German neighbours! That’s why they left their homes and came over to our side of the border, some of them only half-dressed. Some are on bikes, others on horses and carts loaded with their most precious possessions. I’m not all that surprised some people who live along the border are now declaring that they are German. Everyone has the right to say who they are, and if you’re German, you’re German. But the thing is, these are the same Germans who’ve been eating our bread for the past 20 years, who have lived in our country all this time. They tried to stop us from rebuilding Poland after the last war, and now they’re aiming guns at our chests, guns that they’ve kept hidden all this time. Well we, the Polish people, are not going to forgive them. They must have had so much anger inside. But I’m not afraid of war because I believe we are going to win and I believe that after a thousand years of fighting with our worst Western enemy we are going to destroy them, once and for all. ‘The Germans won’t spit in our face, and they won’t make our children German,’ as the song goes. No longer shall our brothers on the other side of the border live in pain under the German yoke. So I am actually very happy.
The entire Ostrów administration has been evacuated by train. Most people have left too. Our army is moving to new positions. It looks like Ostrów is going to be surrendered without a fight. I’m not really worried about it though, I am sure it must be part of our military plan…
It’s the afternoon now and I have packed most of my things, just in case. I didn’t want to leave the city at first, but as soon as Dad got back he got all his stuff together, even his fishing rod, and convinced me that we should catch the last train.
I know we’ll never give up, however hard things get. Even so, what happened next made me wonder. In the evening, people were no longer just leaving, they were running for their lives. Around 11 p.m. all remaining soldiers started to retreat, blowing up every bridge behind them. People are fleeing with no idea where they are going. We’re told to run away, but where to, and why?…
…We made it onto the last train. From the last carriage, they destroyed the tracks behind us. People are shocked by the amount of guns and ammunition the ethnic Germans had on them. Where did they hide them all? How come our military hadn’t spotted them? We were looking for little clues, but missed the big ones, it seems. And now we see the results of our carelessness. The sky behind us is red. We can hear shooting in the distance, and we are nearly in Czekanow. And here we stay until 3 a.m.
As German land and air forces attacked simultaneously from the south, west and north, Edward and his father fled east, in the direction of Warsaw.
2 September 1939
In the morning we pull into Kalisz, but everyone’s being evacuated from there as well. Our train is chased by German planes all day long. I wasn’t scared of them until I saw what they could do. I saw charred skeletons in burned-out trains—they were people once. I saw people with no arms and legs, I saw a head roll into a ditch, I saw human insides hanging off telephone wires. When you hear the moans of the dying, and children crying, and then just moments later you see a plane right above you drop its bombs, well all you can do is wait for death. You no longer care about the dying, or the orphans. It’s them today, but it might be your turn tomorrow. I got very sad thinking I might have to die far away from the people I love. That was the only thing I cared about.
There have been funny scenes today too. Every time we got bombed this young couple jumped off the train and ran into the potato fields, because someone had apparently told them to get at least 300 metres away from the train when there’s a raid. So every time the train started moving again, they had to run as fast as they could to get back on. We stayed the night in Sieradz.
3 September 1939
Queues of carts pulled by oxen in the streets, everyone is running from the Germans, the villagers are more afraid of them than of the devil himself, or just as much. In any case, the devil is always dressed up as a German in all the pictures they see. Where are all these people headed? They have no idea. How many will come back to find their family home in ruins?
At a station after Sieradz our train took on the first wounded. These people covered in blood are the first crop of the harvest of war—and to think, all of it caused by just one person, Hitler. When you cut wood, there are always splinters, as the saying goes.
Our train stops on the approach to Łódź. People look up to see if they can spot the bearers of death in the skies, coming to turn our carriages into coffins. And then, there they are. First we hear their engines, then we see them, like black hawks. They are flying towards Łódź airport, it seems. We can see three of our Polish silver birds chasing them. The heavy hawks rise up and up, slowly. There are nine of them. Our birds approach from the sides, two of them sit on the German tails. After a while, two of the German planes fall with smoke pouring out; the rest fly away. We all feel very happy. Hope fills our hearts again as we see what our silver birds can do to their hawks. The train begins to move, but just as we get to Łódź station, we’re under attack once again. We run for cover. From our shelter underground we can hear the din of anti-aircraft guns, the sound of airplanes and explosions. This might be our grave, we’ll be buried alive if it collapses on our heads. This could be the end.
We hear a radio announcement that England has declared war on Germany, but the news comes as a terrible shock—why only now? The Germans have already crossed the Varta river, thousands of cities have been bombed, thousands of German planes are hovering over the whole of our country. You were supposed to come and help Poland right from the start! The sky is bright red in the north, where the spirit factory is on fire. We sleep at the train station.
A few blocks away from Łódź railway station, fifteen-year-old Dawid Sierakowiak was also sheltering from the German air raid.
3 September 1939
Half past midnight, an air-raid siren. I curse like a trooper. It’s cold, dark and horrible outside. In the shelter we mess around a bit, but as usual the women shriek at us, ‘This is war, you know—it’s not a party!’ We go out onto the street. We’d rather face the cold and the bombs