Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Martin Koby - April 20, 1999

So that was liberation.

That was liberation. Uh, my father and mother went to us, she said, "Don't leave, don't do anything. You guys stay here." It was me, Tante Chyka and my brother. We stayed in the house. They went away. I don't know where they went. They came back and they brought some flour in a sack and they brought some bread and they brought some potatoes. And they said, "We are leaving right now for Rovno." But this--you know, you got to walk uh, almost two kilometers to the highway.

Hm.

So we walked in the snow in this mush to the highway. We had to take the same road that the army was moving on. We had a little river in our village you know, right, right through the center of the village, a big, a big meadow and a small little dinky river.

Yeah.

It was part of the ??? okay. It was one of those all--goes all the way to the--to the--to the uh, Dniep...or...

To the Dnieper?

Huh?

To the Danube?

No, no. Dniep...I mean uh, the, the--what goes through Kiev, what river?

Uh, through Kiev?

Yeah. Dnieper.

Dnieper, yeah.

Dnieper.

Yeah.

Not Danube, Dnieper.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

It goes all the way there.

There, there it is, okay.

Yeah, because this drains all this big, big, big area.

So that ran through a...

I don't know, a little--little...

...uh, a tributary ran through there.

Yeah, a little, little, little you know--when I saw the Jordan River, that was my, my river, that's how wide it was. But--except it was flooded, you know. It's--the water spilled out on the, on the, on the, on the meadows.

Okay.

But we had to go--you know, cross this little river. The only problem was, the bridge was not--it was not functioning. A Russian tank got onto the bridge and fell in. And I saw they were putting in logs in the way, with ropes and chains. That way you know, like uh, remind you of--thought about uh, like the Volga boatmen that used to pull the boats?

Yeah.

You know, we had a little education in that. We already knew about it, the Volga boatmen. And they were you know, a guy was over there, "One, two, three, heave!" You know?