Vasili Ivanovich Krill, born November 8, 1920. His wife is the former Maria Gregorjevna Rock. They were both born in the village of Follush, Yaslo district, in Poland.

We were forced to leave Poland in 1945. The second world war was not yet over. This was the spring of 1945. Some people that called themselves "special delegates" came to Follush and tried to persuade us to leave. They said that the Poles had been chased out of Ukraine into Poland, that we had to give them our houses and then go the Ukraine and take over the homes that the Poles had left when they moved out.

The people didn't want to go, but no one openly protested. They gave us the following week to get ready. They came with wagons and we loaded our stuff onto them and then they drove the villagers to the railroad station in Jaslo. We were allowed to take the cows, the horses and some food. At the railroad station they allotted us some boxcars for the animals and separate ones for the people.

They took us to the border town of Hiriv, there we had to transfer over to wide-gage Soviet railroad box cars which took us to the Voroshilovgradski region in Ukraine.

Out of our entire village there were only two families that were not resettled to Ukraine. Initially, they were doing forced labor on the German border to the west. After the end of the war they returned to their native village, but the Poles would not let them live there.

I knew those people. One of them told me that when he returned to Follush and was asleep in his bed at night, some Poles came to his house and stole his roof. He wasn't even given the right to protest! He was forced to move back to the Polish-German border.

They all cried, all the people that were being sent to Ukraine, no one wanted to go.

We left Follush on April 25, 1945, and we arrived at a railroad station in the Voroshilovgradski region on May 9, 1945.

There, people milked their cows in the street and eat whatever they had with them.

From the railroad station they sent us to a collective farm in the Rovenjki district. They put us into chicken coops to live. We worked on the collective farm, but the pay was very, very poor.

The year 1947 was a year of severe starvation in Eastern Ukraine, and the people wanted to return to Poland. Me and two of my friends decided to leave. We rode on the roofs of railroad cars from the Donbass area of Ukraine to Lviv in west Ukraine. From Lviv we went to Chirov and we wanted to cross the border, but they wouldn't let us. The border had already been close off. So we returned to Lviv, to the skneelov railroad station. There at the railroad station we were attacked by Russian soldiers and robbed. After that there wasn't much for us to do. We knew that some of the villagers from Follush had found their way to the Roodka Samborski area, so we went there, too.

We had no place to live and no jobs. A lot of my acquaintances went to the Odessa area to look for work.

But I had an aunt in Borislav and so I went there instead. In Borislav I got a good job building bridges.

After I found a place to live, my parents came to live with me in Borislav. Then I married Maria who had been living in Roodka and then came to Borislav, where we have been living to this present day.