Tag #123757 - Interview #88493 (Samuel König)

In Kiev they passed us on to yet another school. We were given food, and school uniforms. Eventually they evacuated us from Kiev. At night. In the afternoon earlier that day lots of soldiers passed through the city, right, to the Dnepr River and across. The bridge was bombed that evening. There were two bridges, a wooden one and the other, more solid. We sheltered all night in the famous Pecherska Lavra [monastery complex in Kiev, nowadays the residence of the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church], the gold-roofed monastery. When the bombing ended at dawn, all the men marched out. Others joined along the way and [eventually] we reached Poltava [ca. 300 km from Kiev]. Oh, [there was] a Pole with me who came from our town, Franek Gawryluk. I told him, ‘You’re going home, so tell them I’m not coming back, I’m staying with the Russians.’ I’ve never had any contact with my family since.

And so I went to Poltava with the rest of the school. And to Donbas [Donetsk Basin, region in eastern Ukraine] before that. I was with a lot of people. This students’ group was separate, but the whole crowd marched together, I mean fled together. Eventually they consolidated us with a mining school in Donbas.