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The authorities in Lublin were getting organized. I was probably late in receiving notification to return to Poland, that a train was being organized; I wasn’t returning alone – 700 of us from that district were returning.
The situation was such that they were mostly people of Jewish nationality, because those of Polish nationality returned via Iran. Several thousand Jews also went that way. I think about 200,000 people [Jews] survived thanks to getting sent out to those remote regions of Russia. [Editor’s note: The Central Committee of Jews in Poland registered 136,579 Jewish repatriates from the USSR.]
I was on the train for over a month. From Kokanda in Uzbekistan. I was one of two head stewards on the train. The other one had been a scout at one time, of Jewish descent, an assimilated type. We took charge of supplies, because we had to procure bread along the way.
The real head steward was some captain of Kazakh descent, constantly drunk. We weren’t given too warm a welcome on the Polish-Soviet border – the local population there gave us hostile stares, and you could hear shouts of: ‘The Yids are back!’ but there were no attempts at attack [27].
I landed up at the PUR, the State Repatriation Office, I didn’t go to Kielce, but was sent to Lodz. I went around dressed in this yellowish-colored top and trousers – I’m sure I looked like a Vietnamese refugee or worse. And I read ‘apteka’ [Polish: pharmacy] as ‘arteka,’ because I was still pronouncing ‘p’ like ‘r’ [‘r’ in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian looks like ‘p’ in the Latin alphabet].
And in Lodz I landed a Warsaw contact, as they say; you see in Warsaw in 1946 the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland, PRL [28], were forming. Then I was summoned to Warsaw by one of my Polytechnic friends who had already taken up posts in the government authorities – or lower down, but high enough up to summon.
The situation was such that they were mostly people of Jewish nationality, because those of Polish nationality returned via Iran. Several thousand Jews also went that way. I think about 200,000 people [Jews] survived thanks to getting sent out to those remote regions of Russia. [Editor’s note: The Central Committee of Jews in Poland registered 136,579 Jewish repatriates from the USSR.]
I was on the train for over a month. From Kokanda in Uzbekistan. I was one of two head stewards on the train. The other one had been a scout at one time, of Jewish descent, an assimilated type. We took charge of supplies, because we had to procure bread along the way.
The real head steward was some captain of Kazakh descent, constantly drunk. We weren’t given too warm a welcome on the Polish-Soviet border – the local population there gave us hostile stares, and you could hear shouts of: ‘The Yids are back!’ but there were no attempts at attack [27].
I landed up at the PUR, the State Repatriation Office, I didn’t go to Kielce, but was sent to Lodz. I went around dressed in this yellowish-colored top and trousers – I’m sure I looked like a Vietnamese refugee or worse. And I read ‘apteka’ [Polish: pharmacy] as ‘arteka,’ because I was still pronouncing ‘p’ like ‘r’ [‘r’ in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian looks like ‘p’ in the Latin alphabet].
And in Lodz I landed a Warsaw contact, as they say; you see in Warsaw in 1946 the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland, PRL [28], were forming. Then I was summoned to Warsaw by one of my Polytechnic friends who had already taken up posts in the government authorities – or lower down, but high enough up to summon.
Period
Interview
Julian Gringras
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