Wait a while. The sun's still shining for them...

 

Stanisław Koszewski (born 1936), a poet and author of epigrams. His home village of Suchawa was inhabited by Poles and Ukrainians, with the latter constituting the majority of the residents. On 22 April 1944 the units of SS-Galizien surrounded the village to collect a contingent. The leaders of the formation were German, but the majority of its members were Ukrainians. A sniper was set up on the Orthodox church tower, and the SS men came to the Koszewski family’s house in the morning. Stanisław Koszewski’s brother Tadeusz let the cow out from the barn and went after it to the pasture. An SS man who saw that shot the animal dead, summoned the boy, and started beating him for no reason. The boy’s mother heard the screaming and ran to rescue him. Other SS men, who knew their sadistic boss, stopped her, thinking that she would make the situation worse. Unfortunately, the officer saw their exchange, told Tadeusz to go towards the house, and shot him in the back of the head in cold blood. Around the same time, Stanisław Koszewski’s older brother, 17-year-old Kazimierz, was trying to flee with his Ukrainian friend into the forest. They ran into an SS patrol – the soldiers hit the girl with a rifle butt, so that she lost consciousness, and shot Kazimierz dead. It is unclear, whether he was shot by the SS men on patrol or by the sniper on the church tower. Stanisław Koszewski’s mother, who had just lost two of her sons, was arrested and taken to Włodawa. On the way there, the SS men murdered an innocent elderly man, whose only fault was that his granddaughter defended herself from getting raped by an SS man. Stanisław Koszewski’s mother managed to flee and return home when no one was paying attention. Back home, she had to bury two of her sons…