Regina Cohen - April 18, 1982
Traveling Home
Mm-hm.
And that list would follow us wherever...
You had to stay together in other words.
We always got onto the same trains.
Uh-huh.
And that's the way we traveled 'til we got to Prague. And in Prague uh, we went to the um, oh, an office uh, for displaced persons coming back home.
Mm-hm.
And uh, they gave us a card, I still have it at home. It's a pink uh, card--a two-page card with my name and a stamp, and on it is a stamp of May the 11th 1945. And they gave us five hundred koruna, which is equivalent to uh, a hundred dollars. And they gave us lodging for a few days and uh, food. And given train uh, permission to use the trains to go homeward. And we stopped in cities like uh, uh, ??? and then Slovakia, Bratislava, then we got to Budapest, Hungary, because that's how the trains--they just didn't go in--and you had to go where the trains took you. And we stopped at each of those cities and then--but then we already had the identification card, so we could split up.
Mm-hm.
Some people went off to Slovakia, some one city, and another in Hungary, and another one somewhere else. After we had uh, uh, the little card, we were uh, to use that and that would permit--was our uh, permit to travel the rails, the train or...
Mm-hm.
...whatever means was available. And uh, I got home to Chust sometimes in June--the middle of June. And I found my older sister and her husband. And my oldest brother, who's the second child, he wasn't home. He is--had survived. All the rest of my family...
Through the camps.
Yes, but I didn't see him. I saw him um, five years uh, five years later.
Oh, in 1950?
End of '49. It was almost four and a half years later. Um, we stayed there for uh, in Chust, for about no more than six weeks.
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