Herman Marczak - May 12, 1982
Russians Move Closer
Excuse me, how did you travel from one place to the other? Did you...
Oh the same--no, no, the same thing...
Trains?
...they put us, they put us on cattle trains in like, like a cattle--in, in, in, and schlepped us, that's all. A hundred to a train, that was their, their, their system.
A hundred to one car.
A hundred a train--one car, yeah, one guard from this train, one--a few guards on this so we won't run away. That's the way they transport us. When we came there, January the 15th, all of a sudden it was on a Saturday. It was, in the blue sky we have a, a, a uh, how do you call it--a one, if we go on it. The Russian planes flew over--fifty, sixty. The sky got dark with Russian planes and those Germans got violent. They started chase us out from the factory, they said, "Get out of here." They start whatever they could grab they throwed us. Because they already knew that the Russians will be there in, in a day or two that they--that they're going, they're going to chase 'em out from whole Poland in no time.
Mm-hm.
There was no resistance in 'em. But anyhow, they decided that they have to leave, they're going to take us with them. So we walked, we walked in two shifts, a day shift and a night shift. So they decided they want to take a chance maybe everything will quiet down and to confuse the people, they're going to take the night shift and put them to work Monday morning, and take the day shift and put them on, on the, on the, on the, the railroad cars and take us with them as far as their camp.
Mm-hm.
So that's what they did. They taked all the people that's supposed to stay in the barracks over the day, brought to work at night, and, and chased us in--we brought in through over, over the ??? railroad cars, and put us in those cars and start to drag, to drag us with them.
And what happened to the people that worked...
The people who worked there were liberated and less than twenty-four hours later the Russians was there.
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