Sarah Rainsford
Eastern Europe correspondent in Poland

As the floodwaters have
drained from Glucholazy, they’ve exposed huge damage. On the pretty, main town
square a vehicle, washed away from somewhere, has come to a halt, nose down in
a deep hole in the pavement.

The main bridge was smashed by the swollen river
and collapsed. Its ruins, plunged in the river, are now covered in the tree
trunks that were torn from the embankment. Beyond that, most of Glucholazy’s
streets are now thick with mud.

The floods rushed in so quickly at the weekend,
many people had no time to evacuate.

On Monday, we found Natalia, in tears,
mopping the dirt from her bedroom. She remembered seeing the flood coming. “I
was scared,” she told me.

“The water was everywhere.”

Next door, her neighbour
Krzysztof was distressed too. He and his wife only finished decorating their
flat a month ago. Now a dirty line on the wall shows how the water rose over a
metre high inside his flat.

“I’ve lost everything. All our money went on
repairs,” Krzysztof told me, surrounded by children’s toys coated in dark-brown
mud.

“Now we have nothing.”