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And then I had to go to this ‘rajkom’ [regional committee] to pack all the documents [probably documents of the Soviet authorities, which could not fall into the hands of Germans]. All this is lost now, all my data is in that office. I was there with a friend, Lida Kowalewska. And the Germans were close by. They told me to go east. I offered to my entire family to get on the trucks and go. Father and mother said: ‘We are old and we won’t move anymore.’ So I took my sister Fania with her family, my sister Dina, I put them all on a truck with other Belarusians and I chased after them on my bicycle.
The road was clogged up with cannons, tanks, people and I managed to ride for some 15-20 kilometers on that bike and I didn’t have the strength to go any further. I threw the bike on the road, I saw some soldier pick it up, and I also got on that truck, but they were bombing the road, so we had to get off. At some point the truck left and I was in some small wood next to the road with all of them. My sister was holding the baby, 18 months old; there was my brother-in-law and my little sister. I didn’t have the courage to tell them, ‘We are walking east.’ Because how could you walk with such a crowd of people and a baby? How could I take on responsibility for someone’s life? After all, we weren’t expecting the Holocaust then. We were expecting the worst, but not the Holocaust. That’s why I decided to walk them home.
The road was clogged up with cannons, tanks, people and I managed to ride for some 15-20 kilometers on that bike and I didn’t have the strength to go any further. I threw the bike on the road, I saw some soldier pick it up, and I also got on that truck, but they were bombing the road, so we had to get off. At some point the truck left and I was in some small wood next to the road with all of them. My sister was holding the baby, 18 months old; there was my brother-in-law and my little sister. I didn’t have the courage to tell them, ‘We are walking east.’ Because how could you walk with such a crowd of people and a baby? How could I take on responsibility for someone’s life? After all, we weren’t expecting the Holocaust then. We were expecting the worst, but not the Holocaust. That’s why I decided to walk them home.
Period
Interview
Janina Duda
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