to tell it to leave us alone, but to no avail. The dog kept at it all the way to the guard post. All our clothes were shredded. We walked a long way. Apparently, we had already been close to Stołpce.
At the guard post we were searched and interrogated. We told the whole truth, as we had agreed between us. We told only one lie: that we were on our way to Białystok, where our parents were living at present. The guards wrote everything down and put us in a separate unheated room. Red Army soldiers came in from time to time. They felt sorry for us. We were physi-cally exhausted and mentally resigned. We lay down on the floor and slept through the night. In the morning, we looked out of the window and spotted this telling inscription, Kommunizm smetyot vse granitsy305 (Communism will obliterate all frontiers). We were kept there all day. They gave us one kilo of black bread and a kettle of cold water. In the evening, a Red Army soldier came in, took us out, and said that if the same thing happened again it would end very badly for us. He put us on a train for Minsk and told us to go back to work in Vitebsk. The train stopped in Negoreloye. There, two other border guards got on and took us off the train. They took us to the border control headquarters, where [37] the whole procedure started over again: searching and interrogation. We repeated what we had said at the border. As it turned out, the interrogator didn’t believe us and suspected that we had come from the occupied territories and were trying to enter Russia illegally – a tragicomic situation. He ordered a Red Army soldier to send us back to Stołpce on the next train. Apparently, we were destined for more difficulties. A goods train arrived. The Red Army soldier went out with us onto the platform and looked for a closed carriage, because the frost was very severe. He didn’t find one, however, and put us in an open wagon. We asked our escort, “How come you’re leaving us without any papers?” “Don’t worry”, he said, “everything will be taken care of”. We moved off and reached the border. There we were detained again. Once again, the same interrogation. Then they sent us back to Negoreloye. The soldier who put us on the train was waiting for us. He led us through the station towards the headquarters. We asked him to let us rest and have something to eat because we were hungry and freezing. He let us do so.
