The War
For Us, the War Ends
chairs to make an extra bed. My aunt served Leon some of her fa- mous soup and other homemade foods that he had not tasted for a long time. Leon and I became very good friends, and we have been close friends ever since. We left Rovno at the beginning of 1945. One day in March, we were told that a special transport train would take us to our destina- tion in Poland. All the people who were registered were supposed to be there at a specific time and were assigned room on the train based on the size of their family. My cousin Alex had returned from his assignment with the Russian security forces and was ready to repatriate with us. He had met a beautiful young widow named Sally, whose husband had been killed not long before by the Banderas, and we decided to take her and her baby, Lila, with us. My uncle had also arranged to take a man who was otherwise alone. Thus, we were a large enough “family” to qualify for our own car on the train. When we were allowed to leave Rovno, we were going to go to the new borders of Poland on the transport train with thousands of other people leaving the Ukraine. The journey was long. Every so often, when the tracks were needed for important trains to pass, we were put on the siding to wait for clearance. Sometimes, we waited two or three days. My uncle was imaginative and very capable, and we had enough food; maybe it was provided for us. We were as comfortable as we could be in transit. Eventually, we wound up in Bitom, a mining city in southern Poland that was full of Jewish refugees from all over. I recall that my cousin Boris always carried a pistol, during and after the war, and everyone begged him not to take the pistol on the train because the Russians might discover it and throw us off the train. I remember walking with him and another man, and noticing the grease boxes between the wheels of the train. We wrapped the pistol in plastic and rags, and threw it into one of the grease boxes. The pistol survived the trip. When we arrived at our destination, I stood watch while Boris retrieved the pistol. 1
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