Table Of ContentDiary 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
