Warsaw (AFP) - The Soviets rode in on horseback, rifles dangling on rope. Boguslaw Kamola watched in horror from the woods as they occupied his city in eastern Poland. Then the shots rang out.
"This dog was dashing across the field, and one of the soldiers reached for his rifle and fired at him," he recalls.
"They didn't kill him, just wounded him in the rear. And the poor thing dragged his hind legs across the field, howling with fear as he tried to evade the bullets," he told AFP.
Kamola was nine years old when the Soviets invaded in 1939, just weeks after Nazi Germany attacked the country from the west.
It was the onset of World War II, history's bloodiest conflict, and Poland was being crushed by two powerful forces.
"We were horrified by the barbarity of these people. They shot at everything that moved," the now 84-year-old says in Warsaw ahead of the 75th anniversary of the invasion.
- Russian behind every bush -
It had taken the Soviet forces several days to make it over to Kamola's city of Brzesc -- now Brest in Belarus -- after invading Poland on September 17, 1939.
The surprise assault had been agreed in a secret accord between Germany and the Soviet Union, under which they would divvy up Poland between them.
"It was an agreement between two gangsters," Kamola said of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dubbing it "the famous knife in the back".
His family fled in panic, grabbing random items: a pillow here, some valuables there, a framed picture of the Virgin Mary that has survived until this day -- and an alarm clock.
"It was within reach, so Mom stuffed it in my pocket," he said in an interview alongside his 85-year-old brother Zbigniew.
"And the damn alarm clock started ringing right out there in the open in the middle of the night."
The brothers chuckle as Boguslaw mimes how he frantically tried to silence the alarm.
"This is something you can recount now as an adventure and laugh about 75 years later. But I remember it was a night when every juniper bush looked like a Russian," Zbigniew says.
"The horror, the fear was huge. The stress," the retired geologist told AFP.
The family eventually made their way to Warsaw after a gruelling journey marked by bone-chilling cold and a couple of close calls with the enemy.
- Not this time -
Not wanting to open up a second front, the Polish government had given its forces the order against engaging in battle with the Red Army. Instead, the Polish government and part of the army retreated south, crossing into neutral Romania.
By October 6, Poland ceased to exist, carved up between Berlin and Moscow.
More than 200,000 Polish soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, deported into the depths of the USSR or sent on to areas already occupied by Nazi Germany.
Nearly 22,000 Polish officers, including top brass, were executed on Stalin's orders, notably in the Katyn forest -- a war crime that Moscow falsely blamed on the Nazis for decades.
This year's anniversary of the invasion comes amid renewed tension between Poland and Russia over the bloody crisis in neighbouring Ukraine, where government forces are battling pro-Moscow separatists.
A staunch supporter of the Kiev government, Warsaw has kept close tabs on Russia's actions in the region -- including its annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in March.
But the Kamola brothers do not fear a repeat of 1939.
"We have support of the West now," Zbigniew says, alluding to the iron-clad security guarantees Poland enjoys as a member of NATO.
In the 21st-century it would be "impossible" for someone to annex Poland, adds Boguslaw, a retired foreign trade manager.
"It would spark an international brawl."