until they come for you”. Others were taken away and sent to the railway station as a result of their own complaint, but were not reunited with their family or friends as requested. All that depended exclusively on chance. Some of the refugees escaped immediately from the wagons under some pretext, leaving behind all their baggage. Others tried to intervene with the train station commandant, to whom they showed various certificates from their workplace, MOPR IDs, or Red Cross IDs. Many tried to convince him that a mistake had been made in their case and that a passport was waiting for them at the militia station. Mrs Wasilewska intervened on behalf of some of them, [19] and if they were still at the station they managed to be released. Mr Drobner,673 however, a well-known socialist from Kraków, who had spent many years in a Polish prison for his political convictions, could not be rescued despite Miss Wasilewska’s intervention and a promise that everything would be taken care of. Wires were said to have been sent after the wagon he was in, but purportedly no trace [of him] was found. Finally, after three weeks of the campaign to capture the refugees, some of the trains began to depart.
Behaviour of the Lvov population when the refugees were staying in wagons at the railway stations. It should be added and stressed here that the Polish and Jewish inhabitants of Lvov had a positive attitude towards the captured refugees who were waiting for departure in wagons at the railway stations. While the other refugees, relatives or friends, could not talk to them for fear [20] of going to the railway station, the Lvovians went there because they had passports and they approached the wagons, handing food and other products that might come in handy during the journey, taking in all requests, trying to console the refugees by assuring them that they would not forget them and asking them for news in the weeks to come. Many Lvovians also brought their own bedding to the station, as few refugees had their own pillows or blankets.
So when all the wagons had left and there were rumours that the NKVD detachments, which had arrived to purge the city of the refugees, had now left
