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When Germans entered  Białowieża in June 1941, they immediately imprisoned mother of Jerzy Wiensko. At the end of December, his father and brother were taken to work in nearby Szereszewo. Then they were all taken to Bialystok.

I came to Bialystok in the late autumn of 1942 - recalls Wiensko - I was less than ten years old. We lived in the attic of a Jewish house at 35A Zielona Street  (now L. Zamenhoff Street). Our yard ended with a high fence, over which was probably stretched four rows of barbed wire. It separated the ghetto from the rest of the city. As a child other children and I smuggled food into the ghetto. Several times a week mom was going to collect the food from the nearby villages and there she was buying flour, porridge, potatoes, and strawberries in May. There was a pit under the fence, so that its half was on the side of the ghetto. It was masked with a bag filled with rags and covered with sand. When German guard ,who was walking along the fence, was far and away from the sight, we were quickly taking the bag and pushed the food to the other side of the fence.  The money were already prepared and thrown over the fence in the package with the stone. We were able to differentiate between those ghetto boys only by their voices. One of my older friends told me to approach the guard and ask him in German:  what time is it? When he would get out his watch from his pocket to show me what time it was I was supposed to give him two marks. And so I did; with his watch he hid my money. From this time, the guard was going somewhere and disappearing for a while. At that time, I saw how two boards from the fence were pushed aside and some of my colleagues were entering the ghetto. There was an exchange of goods. After a while, maybe a few minutes later, I heard that the German was hitting the fence with his cobbler and shouting "raus" or "halt". It was a sign that the guard was coming back and we had to mask the passage and escape. One day we heard shots and explosions from the side of the ghetto. When I looked through the window, on the opposite side of the street  I saw soldiers standing on a high pile of boards  with a machine gun aimed at our house. I got scared. Then I saw how one of the soldiers shot a fleeing Jewish woman, and another one killed near between the nearby houses. After some time arrived a horse platform and all of the bodies were thrown on it. "
Marek Jankowski (JT)
Text written in 2007