Antonín Moťovič

“We – my mum, three children, and also Mum’s sister-in-law and brother-in-law – we set off the earliest day possible in the night on the one side of the Dniester, there where he told us to go. A kilo of sugar, and they took us across in rowing boats. The Dniester was flooded, it washed my sister somewhere far off, and it took us several hours to find her, but she got out somehow or other. We wouldn’t all fit into one boat. Then we were ambushed by the locals in the night; my sister still has a big scar from that, and they stole everything we had there, those few sugar cubes. But what they took, they took with them and left. So we got to the closest town, Nadworna it was called, to some family, and we gave all we had left to one man who guided us over the Carpathians back to Subcarpathian Ruthenia.”

“We went there. We were there for some two or three weeks. We were among the last people in the ghetto. In the meantime my brother – who hadn’t been accepted to grammar school – trained as a car mechanic, and the Gestapo in Khust took him in to care for their cars. And that’s why we were among the last to go, in the last transport. They brought in some cattle wagons on the siding, stuffed 45–50 people into them, a big barrel for weeing and pooing into, and off we went. We only saw through a wired-up window at the top, we never opened it. But before that, we travelled in the direction of Slovakia, through Slovakia to Poland, to Auschwitz, to Osviecim. There were Eisenbahners at the station in Košice in Slovakia, they tapped our wheels and told us: ‘Don’t worry, the second front has started, the Americans have crossed the sea, they’re starting to conquer Germany.’ But we were already in the wagons.”

“I must say that it was without violence or anything, we didn’t put up a fight either; they sat us into cars again and took us over the border. I remember that as a child – I was fourteen years old in the year forty-one. I remember that as the most horrible experience, not in the concentration camp, but I’d never had such a shock at the time. My brother had his wits about thouigh, he didn’t go with us on the hay wagon. There were carts with hay or farm produce that went to Khust in the morning. It was market day in Khust. He joined them and went with them and wasn’t with us. We later found out that it didn’t matter – he came there, started living there, and that was that. When we came out the second time, we reckoned: ‘We’ll wait until the night, we’ll be wiser this time, we won’t say hi to all the workers, not with any families, but also by road, in some wagon...’ We didn’t have anything to give, but hopefully there would be someone who’d take us to Khust. And so we got back to Khust.”

“One of the chauffeurs, one of the lorry drivers, was a cousin of my mother. I recognised him and he recognised me. ‘Hey, I’ve been looking for you the whole time.’ They transported supplies, food, and he’d take out sugar, sugar cubes from sacks, and give it to the people. For ten cubes of sugar, you’d get ten kilos potatoes. He gazed at us: ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ And he started crying. ‘Get out of here, go. Do anything in the world, just don’t stay here.’ He told us what had happened in Kamianets-Podilskyi – they knew about it. He said: ‘They’ll all kill you here. Germans, Ukrainians, Hungarians, they don’t want you, try to get away.’ He gave us some addresses – he was prepared for it – the addresses of some families on one side of the Dniester and the addresses of people on the other side of the Dniester, who would help us cross the border. ‘Cross the Dniester here, and they’ll help you on the other side for the sugar I’ll give you. For a kilo of sugar, they’ll take you back across the borders, over the Carpathians; you can only go there in the night – not in the day, or they’d catch you – and they’ll take you back. Find a place to hide; there have been others who’ve returned like this before.’”