Wiktor Mostek

"I remember very well – I still have those associations in front of my eyes – We were working on the field, near the train station. The planes bombarded the village Baranowice and were coming, back flying above the station. They flew so low that I was able to see the German pilot’s face! They were shooting at the same time. Luckily, nobody was injured. This is what I remember from the war. What else do I remember? I remember when the the German planes flew to Słonim. Near Słonim was the Polish airport and the polish planes were taking off from here as well. Polish planes were ( I am not sure how they are called in Polish) they looked like some kind of double-wing planes. I remember Polish soldiers shooting from the plane from the machine guns and by mistake they shoot not the German but their own Polish plane! I remember us running there to see what happened. I remember the plane landing. The pilots were alive but the plane was damaged. I saw the planes in Poland but just a few times. When the Soviets came, the planes above our heads were a usual thing".

"When the Soviets came to Albertyn during the war, we were sent back to school. I started to attended school again and I completed the fourth year in 1941. I was a good student apart from the Russian and Belarusian languages that didn’t go well. Just because I was a good student, the language teachers graded my work more that fairly, as they used to give me a grade C but really my language tests deserved to be no more than D. The headmaster visited my mum a few times to reprimand her, she used to say: Stop speaking polish at home! Speak just Russian because the kids can’t not only read and write, but even speak Russian good enough".