Leon Salomon - June 18, 1990
Introduction
Could you tell me your name please and where you are from?
Leon Salomon and I'm from Maków, Mazowiecki, Poland, 85 kilometers north of Warsaw.
During the war, could you just tell me the names of the places that you were?
In the war time, when the conflict broke out, I was in Maków, the place I was born until about a month or two, then we smuggled the border on the Russian side, which was only about 30 kilometers from our town and I was in the cities like Lomza, Bialystok, Grodno, and later on we got united with my brother who left prior. Before we left and he was a teacher in a town not far from Vilna, 105 kilometers from Vilna and he found out where we were and we got united.
The name of that town?
The name of the town is Kobylnik, like I said, 105 kilometers from Vilna. It's White Russia.
And then where were you from there?
There we were caught again in 1941 when the Russian/German conflict broke out. We were caught again in this particular town.
Did you eventually wind up in Vilna or in a Naroch district?
No, I never was in Vilna, but I was in this town Kobylnik. My brother was a teacher, teaching mathematics, physics, and algebra, all the German and I was going to the same school. He was one of the first fifteen people who were killed, not just Jews, other party people who belonged to maybe other, he was killed mainly because he was Jewish and because he was the teacher of that particular school. He was rounded up by his own student.
We'll come back to this, just tell me the place you were when the war was over, where you wound up in the end?
When the war was over? When the war was over, I wound up in Vilna. From there I came to Poland, Łódź,after a few weeks I left from Łódź to the American side, Austria, the American occupied zone Austria with papers, it was worked out for us as Greek Jews that we were returning to Greece and on the way to Greece, of course, we stopped in Austria and we remained there.
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