have a passport, I can let you sleep in my school. If you do not have a passport, I have no grounds for letting you sleep here”. “So give me a few days off. When I get my passport, I will report to you”, replied the teacher. “No, I do not have a right to do this”. “So what am I supposed to do?” asked the teacher. “During the day I need to come to work but at night I have no right to sleep here”. “Well, you need to have a passport”. And so on, and so on. [7] I need to objectively state that on the whole such dumb headmasters were scarce, but even so such situations did occur.
Ways of obtaining a regular passport. To return to the issue of unemployed refugees, they found two ways they could choose to obtain a full passport. 1) By the agency of machers some of them obtained documents confirming that they were Lvovians or citizens living in the territory of the former Galicia →see on the left page. Others tried to contact a director of an enterprise or factory to use his agency and help to become included on the list of refugee employees indispensable to a given institution.
d2) It should be clarified here that if the refugee managed to obtain a gusievka by contacting a director or manager of an institution through a macher, the money the refugee paid went not only into the macher’s pocket but also to those managers or directors, as the refugees were intentionally entered ad hoc on the list as permanent employees indispensable to a given institution.d
Both in the first and second case the thing to do was to use the machers’ services and incur substantial expenses. As for obtaining the Lvov documents, it was done as follows. [8] First of all, the refugee had to obtain a posvidka674 (a word taken from the Ukrainian language), that is, a document confirming that he had been registered and lived in Lvov before 17 September 1939, that is, before the well-known date of Molotov’s address, on which grounds he was now entitled to a normal Lvov passport (provided that there were no grounds for him to be issued a Lvov passport with §11). Aside from such a posvidka the refugee needed to submit a doctor’s certificate justifying his collection of the passport at a later date. To obtain such a posvidka one had to contact the owner of a building that had not been nationalised (there were still some, as the Bolsheviks had not nationalised unprofitable build
d-d The announced note on the left page, verso of the previous sheet.
