Tag #155350 - Interview #103735 (Nikolay Schwartz Biography)

We got lucky and managed to escape, when we were near a village before evening. There were no Germans left in the village. There were only locals. We were let into a house. I was the only one of the three of us who could speak Russian. Of course, Russian is different from Ukrainian, but they could understand me. They said we had to move to the rear and showed us the direction. We thought that ‘rear’ was a name of a village or town. We crossed a Don’s arm over a bridge that the Russians built during their attack and moved on. Again we asked to stay overnight in a house. Though we were enemies, fascists, in the minds of local people, but they let us in and gave us boiled potatoes in jackets. They were very poor, but they shared with us what they had. However, before going to sleep they took away our knives, but they returned them in the morning. So we walked having a vague idea about where we were going. Henrich Singer from Uzhgorod was a tailor. When we came into a house to stay overnight, he fixed the hosts’ clothes to pay back for their hospitality. In one house I fixed a sewing machine. We got meals and food to go for this. We were always hungry, but we had good luck. Once, on the front line we bumped into a truck. The driver was dead. We found dried bread in his pockets. There were horse corpses around. The frost was so severe that the meat became stone hard. We cooked a piece of horse meat on the fire somehow. But this luck didn’t happen often.