Tag #128734 - Interview #96915 (Natalia (Bronislava) Chepur)

My mother said "Good bye" to the colleagues, took her suitcase with my clothes for the summer and we went to the railway station. There we heard that Dimitrovka was already occupied by the Germans. We ran back to the pier. The boats were still there and we sailed to Dnepropetrovsk. Again a horrific bombing began in the vicinity of the Kiev. We got into a pit. I remember the earth shaking and the fear. Later we kept moving. I remember sailing under the bridge. A bomb hit it but it didn't explode. We reached the railway station at the dusk. We boarded some platform for coal transportation. The crowd of people was in panic. I remember somebody calling "Dovid! Dovid! Somebody must have lost his child in this crowd. The train left at night. We were crossing the Salskiye steppe, moving across the fields with wheat and elevators in the fields. The heat was oppressive. We got off the train when it stopped to get some water. We were black from the coal dust. We finally reached Stalingrad.