Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939-44

Zygmunt Klukowski was a physician, surgeon, and supervisor at Zamosc County Hospital in Szczebrzeszyn, Poland, when the Germans occupied his country. A veteran of World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the Polish-Russian War of 1920-21, he also was respected as a historian. From 1939 to 1944 he kept a detailed secret journal, making entries daily at first and then, near the end of the occupation, even more frequently. His observations range from matter-of-fact anticipation of war in 1939 to information about his own and other Poles' underground activities. As a whole, the entries reveal his growing recognition that the Nazis intended to destroy Polish culture and all those who had been its bearers.
When originally published in Polish, the diary won a major award and soon went into a second edition. Now translated by his son and edited by his grandchildren, Klukowski's diary provides a rare picture of how noncombatants coped with life in German-occupied eastern Poland.
Klukowski chronicled births, deaths, deportations, liquidations, partisan actions, and much more. His devotion to detail resulted in an amazingly long list of victims who fell to the German Occupation forces.