Read By Chance Alone for Free Online Page B

mountain plateau that had several large sheds and a sawmill where lumber was being processed. This place was called Havasalya, and it was located near the Tatar Pass, which led to Ukraine. The police moved us to an area of long tables, and we were processed and asked for identification. Our bundles were checked for hidden valuables and currency. They checked all our belongings thoroughly, even looking at the shoulder pads in our jackets and inside loaves of bread. One family was beaten for hiding a gold watch on a chain and several rings; these items were discovered when a policeman dipped his bayonet into a jar of jam and pulled out the hidden valuables.
    My mother had charged me with hiding our currency during the journey, and I had placed it inside the lining of my boots. When I saw the police so thoroughly checking every person, I told my mother that I was afraid I would be caught. She told me to act normally, but she looked worried. When it was our turn to be inspected, the officer requested our documents and then asked us where our men were. My mother and aunt told the officer that they were in the labour battalions, and he simply said, “Move on.” I breathed a big sigh of relief.
    Once the entire group was processed, we were directed to three sheds, where we bedded down with approximately three hundred people per shed. The sawdust on the floor cushioned us somewhat as we slept, so it was more comfortable than the cattle car. But the shed was very hot during the day, and its gappy lumber walls made it cold and drafty at night. We staked out a spot for our family, and this became our home for the next twoweeks. There was no water available at the site and we had to fetch it in pails from quite a distance away, guarded all the while by gendarmes. The Tisza River came from the mountains, and it was clear and ice cold. We used this water for drinking only—there was never enough left to bathe in or wash our clothes. Our food rations consisted of a bowl of soup a day; those who had money could buy a loaf of round black rye, the size of a kaiser bun, from the local Ruthenians who came to the area where we filled our pails. Now the money that I had hidden was a blessing, and it was able to sustain us and others who were needy in the weeks that we were there. We paid dearly for this bread and the exchange had to take place clandestinely, when the guards were out of sight.
    Families who went before us had written their names on the wooden planks that formed the wall of the shed. Each person’s family name was written down, along with the day of their departure and the name of their destination—Kamenets-Podolsky. Thousands of names from previous transports were scribbled on the walls. Each one was like a life marker, a statement to remind the world that these people had lived. *
    At the end of the second week, we were all assembled and the captain in charge, a moustached Hungarian officer riding on a big horse, told us that the next day we would be taken in trucks to our workplace at Kamenets-Podolsky, and that we should be in front of our shed with our bundles early the next morning. We wrote our names on the walls, just as the others before ushad, and my mother lightened the load by removing from our belongings anything that was not useful.
    The next morning, we were loaded onto a convoy of trucks under the supervision of the Kommandant. He wished us a good journey and gave the order for the trucks to move out. It was a Saturday morning, and the trucks laboured to climb to a higher elevation until we reached the Tatar Pass. From there, the road gradually descended. We were now in German-occupied Ukraine.
    All at once, someone in my truck yelled that the Kommandant was approaching from behind at full gallop. When he reached us, he ordered our driver to stop, then repeated the process until he caught up with the lead truck. He then announced that we were not going to Kamenets-Podolsky after all and instead