The train was overflowing. People on the roof. The last train to Lviv. War was in the air. Nobody talked about anything else. But. Nobody expected it to be that close. No suitcase. Nothing. My father said ‘I’m coming in a few days’. He got home, call-up papers were waiting for him. Called up to the military. The train stopped in every village, everywhere, people, more people, hanging on, one holding another. Unbelievable, the sight. The soldiers were lying on the platform, next to another, like sardines, sleeping. When we arrived we didn’t know how to get off the train. Because at 5am the Germans had bombed the city & the station: these soldiers; I saw them, it was horrible. That stuck in my mind very much.

Within a few days the Soviet forces occupied. There was a pact. In October suddenly my father appeared, looking like a wild, wild creature. A long black beard & eyes. We didn’t know who it was. Barefoot. They disbanded the army, he walked to Lviv, had to shed uniform. He was in very bad shape. Traumatic, absolutely. At night he was shouting, screaming in his dreams. He was almost paralysed, out of sheer nerves. He had to be hospitalised. They were treating the actual pain he had with bags of hot sand. With hot sand. Imagine that. When he got a bit better he had to work, of course. He couldn’t say his profession. Because the Russians did not like what they called ‘the bourgeois’. Not that we were capitalists, but, in their eyes, that’s what it was! He got a job as a cabinetmaker in some institution.

“Lviv was the sort of capital of the refugees. They started saying ‘It’s a wonderful thing, we can go back!’ It was 1940. Posters all over town that you can register, if they want to go back to their families. My father said, ‘Don’t do that. It’s a trick.’ But they registered. My father didn’t. One nice night they were all taken, to Kazakhstan, to Siberia. Some were shot. We stayed behind. I wish we’d have been taken. Who knows? Because these people, on the whole, they survived & we… Then the Germans came & you know what happened. That’s how it was.