Tag #157503 - Interview #100414 (Michal Warzager)

I read an announcement there about some organization – I don’t remember what it was called, something or other in Polish – and that it was possible to go to Poland. I got my discharge from the army – I’d already served longer than I had to anyway. It was wintertime then: the winter of 1945/46. There were a few of us, and we'd been told which train we were to take. It was bitter cold, but we’d squeezed onto a step and there we stood. Our feet were freezing in those shoes – they hadn’t given us winter boots [rubber boots lined with felt], only officers got those. And off we went, and there were sailors in the train as well. Not like you get here – they were real feisty. They forced the doors open and went into one of the carriages to get warm. And trouble started – the woman who was in charge of that carriage wanted to get the police, but somehow they talked her out of it. And on we went, all the way to Yaroslavl – that’s ... I don’t know, however many kilometers from Moscow. And as luck would have it, the train stopped in the same place our former unit had been stationed in. That village was called Karmanovka. I'll be damned, there I was again! But we stopped there for a long time, and I knew some people there, so I went and stayed with them.

Then later that treaty was signed to evacuate Poles who wanted to return to Poland [see Evacuation of Poles from the USSR] [6]. I signed up for that – they gave us papers. That was in 1946. We spent a whole month in the train, until finally we arrived in Legnica.