Володимир Шарко

About the 1st of September, I remember, my father heard [humming motors] and said: "Eh, airplanes are flying – I wonder what kind of aircrafts are they?" We went outside - and indeed there were airplanes (and at that time airplans above Lviv was a rarity). And we looked at them - he wanted to see, and then he said: "There are signs, there are signs on the plane!" Plane was flying low enough so that you could see something. Father said: "This is a German plane, there is a swastika!" And I look closer and said, "That's not a swastika!" "Well, this square symbol – it is the swastika!" That was a sign of the German Luftwaffe that is a cross ... Cross, but with four corners. And this sign was on the wings of the plane. It was, in fact, the Germans - we knew that they were Germans. The Germans came close to the city and stayed there. For a few days nobody knew what's going on, and we thought that Germans had come to the city, but they stayed outside of Lviv, and a few days later the Red Army came and then the soviet occupation began.

The Soviets came to Vienna. Relatives left sooner, I can’t remember which month, outside Vienna, and stayed there in some Austrian village, and my sister and I went further to school. And then we also went from Vienna ... we got in the difficult way on one of the last trains that were taking families away, and above all - the German army officers and others militaries. These trains were full, and we somehow got permission to get a train ticket for me and my sister ... What I remember - I popped her to the door in order to climb in, and it was too difficult to push through. But we got on the train, and there I was told – I spoke German quite well – that I got a certificate, I was told: «Diese kleine Ausländer» (“This little foreigners”).

September 1st was either Saturday or Sunday. I know that on Monday next week I had my school to begin again – I was going to the second grade of elementary school. Here in Lviv there was a Native school named after the Prince Leo. Those few days there wasn’t any school, nothing (I do not remember for how long), and the first thing that the Soviets did - they said: your first grade was insufficient, you’re going back to the first grade. So I went for the second time to the first class. Again we started to learn the same things, to read and to write.

In about 6 months, maybe more, before the end of the first soviet era, my father no longer lived in the house. Somebody told him that he could be arrested ... not that he would be, but that he is on the list and that we all are on the list, that he would be arrested and sent to Siberia or to the prison. Then he began to hide often. He never slept in the house, never was in the house, only occasionally met us somewhere in the neighborhood - kids and a wife, and so he was hiding somewhere with friends, somewhere in the country - but I do not know where. We did not know where he is hiding. But, actually, due to this fact he survived. And then, as the Bolsheviks came for the second time, there was no doubt of his arrest ... A lot of people left in the 1939th year, many Ukrainians moved from Lviv to Poland, to the west, or to the Slovak Republic, and later returned. But father resolved to remain with his family: so hard because of four children, and ... well I do not know why but this was his decision. So the second time he had no doubt we needed to escape from the Bolsheviks, and we moved from Lviv.