Tag #125225 - Interview #89859 (Estera Sava)

A few days before the war began [Ed. note: Romania entered World War II on 22nd June 1941, when the Romanian Army attacked the Soviet Union alongside Germany and its allies.], the army let my husband go, because the Telephone Company kept filing requests – they wanted him back because he was an expert and experts were needed. The colonel who was the head of the subunit was missing; a new petition was received from the Telephone Company, so the major who was in charge told my father: ‘Quickly, go to the clerk, arrange to get the papers, and tonight you’ll be out of here!’ Imagine my surprise when he showed up at our door. Everybody knew we were on the threshold of a war. When I saw him, I asked him: ‘What are you doing here? Are you a deserter?’ – ‘Yes, I’m a deserter’, he said, but he was laughing. And he told me how they had let him go. Only a few days later, the war began. His former subunit went to Russia and to the Don River; almost all of them died. If the beginning of the war had caught him there, I would have become an 18-year-old widow.