File:Polish victim of German Luftwaffe action 1939.jpg

Summary

Kazimiera Mika, a 12 years old Polish girl, mourns the death of her older sister Andzia (14), who was killed in a field near Jana Ostroroga Street in Warsaw during a German air raid by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftwaffe" class="extiw" title="en:Luftwaffe">Luftwaffe</a>.

Photographer Julien Bryan described the scene: "As we drove by a small field at the edge of town we were just a few minutes too late to witness a tragic event, the most incredible of all. Seven women had been digging potatoes in a field. There was no flour in their district, and they were desperate for food. Suddenly two German planes appeared from nowhere and dropped two bombs only two hundred yards away on a small home. Two women in the house were killed. The potato diggers dropped flat upon the ground, hoping to be unnoticed. After the bombers had gone, the women returned to their work. They had to have food.

But the Nazi fliers were not satisfied with their work. In a few minutes they came back and swooped down to within two hundred feet of the ground, this time raking the field with machine-gun fire. Two of the seven women were killed. The other five escaped somehow.

While I was photographing the bodies, a little ten-year old girl came running up and stood transfixed by one of the dead. The woman was her older sister. The child had never before seen death and couldn't understand why her sister would not speak to her...

The child looked at us in bewilderment. I threw my arm about her and held her tightly, trying to comfort her. She cried. So did I and the two Polish officers who were with me..." [Source: Bryan, Julien. "Warsaw: 1939 Siege; 1959 Warsaw Revisited."]

In September 1959 Julien Bryan wrote more about it in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_(American_magazine)" class="extiw" title="en:Look (American magazine)">Look magazine</a>:

In the offices of the Express, that child, Kazimiera Mika, now 30, and I were reunited. I asked her if she remembered anything of that tragic day in the potato field. "I should," she replied quietly. "It was the day I lost my sister, the day I first saw death, and the first time I met a foreigner - you." Today, Kazimiera is married to a Warsaw streetcar motorman. They have a 12-year-old girl and a boy, 9, and the family lives in a 1 1/2-room apartment, typical of the overcrowded conditions of war-racked Poland. She is a charwoman at a medical school (she told me her biggest regret is that her education ended when the war began), and all of the $75 earned each month by her husband and herself goes for food. Kazimiera and her husband, like most Poles, supplement their income with odd jobs, and are sometimes forced to sell a piece of furniture for extra money. But they celebrated my visit to their home with that rare treat, a dinner with meat.

Licensing

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