Tag #109492 - Interview #83803 (Julian Gringras)

The Germans had long since crossed the border [in July 1941], and my gang and I were still finishing off a job. Only on the sixth day or something did we realize we had to get out, because the Germans were just around the corner. We rustled up a sturdy cart, and there were also a few of my friends from Lwow, Tarnopol, Jews, who piled onto that cart with me, and off we went. We set off from Tarnopol in the direction of Kiev. The road was crowded; there were Ukrainian women working on it, all with white aprons on their head, shovels in hand; probably reinforcing the verges. And so we roamed from village to village: fields of maize and fields of beans for kilometers.

And in the end we stopped in Poltava, where there was a railroad station, and by then we were planning to try to go to Asia. We sold the cart and we waited for a goods train, because there were no longer any passenger trains. Going to Asia. And in the end we got onto some platform; corruption worked, probably – a sweater or something worked, and we found out there was a train going to Tashkent.

We were in that train for a few weeks. At stations you could fish [a mugful of] kipiatok [boiling water], and the local residents sold this and that – a round of sheep’s cheese, or ‘vobla’ – dried fish, tough as the sole of your shoe.

After a few weeks we reached Tashkent.