Wanda Lurie and her son (The amount of love and respect I have for this woman cannot be put into words...)
Wanda Felicja Lurie, known after the war as the Polish Niobe, experienced a true gehenna.
With 50,000 killed in three days, the massacre of Wola, carried out by the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising (1944), ranks among the greatest mass murders in world history. Since the first days of the uprising the attacking Germans were following the Hitler's and Himmler's order which said: kill every citizen, do not take prisoners.
''Until 5 August 1944, I stayed in the basement with my three children, aged 11, 6 and 3-and-a-half, myself being in the last month of pregnancy. On that day at 12 noon or 1 p.m. German gendarmes and ''Ukrainians''* (*actually Russians and Belarusians) entered our courtyard, ordering civilians to get out of the house immediately. When the residents in the basements on the courtyard side got out, the gendarmes threw incendiary grenades into the basements.
A boy of about 12, seeing through the half-open gate that his parents and brother had been killed, went literally berserk, he started screaming, calling his mother and father. The Germans and ''Ukrainians''* beat and shoved him away as he tried to get inside. I was brought into the factory grounds in the last group. In the factory yard I saw piles of corpses as high as one meter.
I begged the ''Ukrainians''* around me to save me and my children. One of them asked if I was able to bail myself out. I gave him three gold rings. Having taken them, he tried to lead me away, but the German in charge of the execution, a gendarmerie officer, who noticed what was happening, didnβt let him and ordered me to be put back in the group to be executed. I started begging him to spare my childrenβs lives and my own, I said something about an officerβs honor. He, however, shoved me back so hard that I fell to the ground. He also hit and pushed my older son, yelling: βFaster, faster, you Polish bandit.β
My children walked crying and praying. My oldest son, seeing the dead, was yelling that they would kill us, too. At one point a "Ukrainian"* standing behind us shot my eldest son in the back of his head. The next shots hit my younger children and me. I fell on my right side. The shot I suffered was not fatal. The bullet hit the left side of my neck, went through the lower part of the skull, and out through my right cheek. I got a maternal hemorrhage. But I remained conscious and was able to see almost everything that was happening around me.
It was already dark when the executions ended. During breaks, the slaughterers would walk over the corpses, kicking, turning them over, killing those still alive and despoiling them. They took away the watch from my wrist, but didnβt notice that I was still alive. While doing these horrible things, they were drinking vodka, singing merry songs, and laughing.
I lay there for three days, that is until Monday. On the third day I felt that the baby I was expecting was still alive. This gave me strength, the thought of rescue formed in my mind. I started thinking, examining possible ways of saving myself.
The passage through the first yard, down which we had been brought in, was blocked by corpses. I could hear German voices behind the gate, I had to look for another way out. I crawled to the third yard, climbed up a ladder, and through an open window-vent I got into a hall. Fearing the Germans, I spent the entire night there. I climbed onto a window sill and in the yard I saw a living human being, a resident from our house, Zofia StaworzyΕska. I joined her.''
Wanda Lurie survived. On 20 of August 1944 at the transit camp in PruszkΓ³w, she gave birth to her son MΕcisΕaw.
MΕcisΕaw - is a very old Slavic origin given name, consists of two elements: msti - 'vengeance' and slav - 'glory, fame.'''
