Tag #156229 - Interview #78541 (Emilia Ratz)

We escaped eastwards on board a freight train. We had no idea where we were, where the train stopped; we didn’t know anything. It was total chaos. We just wanted to get away from the Germans. We decided to head for Kiev when we learned that both Kiev and Odessa had already been encircled. Nonetheless we wanted to go to a big city with a university to continue our studies. I think we boarded ten different trains. We arrived in Dnepropetrowsk, a fairly big city, and planned to stay there. That very night the city was being bombed for the first time. We had no money and decided to work in a kolkhoz 11. The name of the village was Kotelnikowo [today Russia], later a location where pretty fierce fighting took place.