Tag #123755 - Interview #88493 (Samuel König)

In June 1941 I was home, on a leave. They let us go home, the three of us – two Ukrainians and me. Maybe for some school achievements, I don’t know, there got to be something anyway. I came home for four days and those were exactly the days just before the outbreak of the war. 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th June - and the war broke out on 22nd June. We set off back to school at dawn and we saw German planes flying from Lwow and heading for Przemysl, to bomb Tarnopol.

The school was evacuated to inland Russia. But only a few of us stayed. The local Ukrainians fled, the Poles also left. And anyway there was no supervision [anymore], there was nobody to watch over us. It was a mess everywhere, right. They moved us near the old, pre-war Polish-Soviet border. The place was called Woloczysko [Podwoloczyska, ca. 45km east of Tarnopol]. They turned us over to some other school. The Germans were getting closer so they evacuated [us farther] to Kiev. It wasn’t far away. We didn’t stay long in Kiev, maybe two, maybe three weeks, and we marched on, right. The marches were pretty tough. You had to move quickly. [We stayed] in one place for short time only, two weeks [at most]. We had to run again before we even had a chance to settle, the Germans were moving really fast, right.