‘Either you die or our daughter’ - Mum’s knife attack horror

A YOUNG mother has described the terrifying moment her jealous partner held a knife to her throat and told her to choose between losing her daughter and dying herself.

When Agnieszka Bartczak chose herself to save her daughter, Rafal Graczyk stabbed her repeatedly in the neck and stomach and left her in a pool of blood.

The final blow to her neck was so hard that Miss Bartczak later told police she thought the knife had become lodged in her windpipe.

At Cambridge Crown Court on Monday (August 8), Graczyk, 25, was jailed for 11 years for attempted murder, after he pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing.

The court heard that Graczyk had trouble coming to terms with Miss Bartczak’s decision to end their abusive relationship and move out with the couple’s two-year-old daughter Karolina, and had made threats against her.

When Miss Bartczak, 21, got up for work at 4.30am on February 7, she found Graczyk already awake, and a kitchen knife lying on the living room table of their home in Alwyn Close, St Ives.

Sensing danger, she attempted to call police, but Graczyk seized the phone and smashed it on the floor.

He pushed her to the ground and held the knife to her throat, ignoring her cries to think about their daughter.

“It was then that he gave me the choice: either I die or Karolina dies,” Miss Bartczak told The Hunts Post. “What could I say to that? There is no choice: I cannot choose my baby.”

Graczyk then attacked, leaving Miss Bartczak with three puncture wounds in her neck, cuts to her stomach and entry and exit wounds in her left arm.

As she lay bleeding on the floor, she pleaded with Graczyk to call her an ambulance, telling him that she was dying. He refused, telling her: “No, you must die.”

Police officers, having traced the earlier aborted call, arrived at the property, arrested Graczyk and rushed Miss Bartczak to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge for eight hours of emergency surgery.

Miss Bartczak said she felt lucky to be alive – doctors told her she was 10 minutes from death – but that she would live with the effects of the attack forever.

As well as the daily flashbacks, the arm she used to block the knife is weak and scarred, she has problems with her left eye, and is awaiting cosmetic surgery on the scarring on her throat.

“A lot of the time I am thinking about it. What happened? Why? What did he have in his mind?” she said.

“I never thought that he could do something like this. He knew that when I came back from work that day I would move out, so it was his last chance to do something.”

The court heard that Graczyk – who denied in court that he would ever have hurt his daughter – felt he was losing control of the relationship, and had been seen inspecting the kitchen knife several times in the weeks before the attack.

“Now I know that it was planned, but at the time I was not thinking that he could do something so wrong,” said Miss Bartczak.

“When he gave me that choice, for me he was not a daddy any more. When Karolina starts to ask me one day ‘Why do you have scars, Mummy?’, I will tell her. I want to be the first person to tell her what happened.”