Destination England -
Surrender at Lawoczne Station
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8. Surrender at Lawoczne Station
Lwow railway station was very crowded and there were long queues to buy
tickets. Waiting in line, somebody told me that without a special
permit from militia headquarters I would be unable to get ticket to
where I wanted to go. My destination was a place called
Lawoczne. It was only 3 miles from the Czechoslovakian border and
only 70 miles from Hungary. After a short consultation with my
friend, I went to the nearest militia man with a rifle across his
shoulder and told him bluntly where I wanted to go and why. He
didn't say much, but asked Ferdek and I to follow him. We went
through the ticket collector's gate on the platform where the train was
waiting to depart. He hurriedly pointed us towards the little
brake house, which was mounted at the end of a carriage where the
handbrake wheel was housed, and told us to lie low. By the time
we arrived at Lawoczne it was dark. Ferdek wanted to jump off the
train as soon as it was pulling into the station but I wanted to stay
on it a little longer. A minute later we came to a halt at the
platform which was surrounded by militia and Russian border
troops. There was nothing else to do but surrender.
We were taken to the village and placed in small building with bars on
the windows. It looked to us like that in the 'good old days'
this place was used as a post office and later converted to a 'rest and
transit place' for would-be emigrants without passports, a group to
which we now belonged. A few hours later we were called up
separately for interrogation, where they checked our
possessions, confiscating some, returning others. While talking
to
the interviewing officer, I managed to recover few of my
possessions. He had to put my answers on paper, and that was
enough time for me to act. I managed to regain my precious watch,
my Air Force identity card with photograph, my rosary and family
photos.
During the night Ferdek was trying to organise a breakout of our prison
by overpowering the guard standing outside the door, for which he had
already made a key. However I thought it might be too risky since
we didn't know the position of the guardroom or the machine guns, and I
persuaded him to postpone the breakout until the next night. In
the meantime we could check out our surroundings. Unfortunately
for us, the next night we acquired the company of thirty enthusiastic
immigrants from Slovakia. They had been following the strong
communist propaganda in their country which had promised them paradise
on earth. One year later, I met many of them again in Siberia,
very disillusioned and they were dying, mostly from the chest
infections. Anyway, their arrival spoiled our plans and in the
end, the thirty of them and the two of us had to sleep in a room 12
feet by 10.
The following day we were all loaded onto a lorry and transported, with
military escort, to a place called Skole. On the outskirts of
this town there was a camp which accommodated people like us, who were
named 'tourists'. It was Saturday 2nd December 1939. As
soon as we were unloaded I told Ferdek that I wasn't stopping there for
long.
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© Nick Bailey & Krys Bailey (nee Stendera) & Jozef Stendera
2013-2020