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120 5 A New Home in the Recovered Territories? Standing outside the Nowa Sól train station that July 1947, waiting to be led to their new village, the Pyrtej family learned that any relocated Ukrainians who did not own a horse-drawn wagon would be driven in army trucks. The Polish officials assigned two trucks to drive to Troska, where less than a dozen families from Smerekowiec, including the Pyrtej family, were being relocated. Dmytro told Melania that because their baby, Julia, had not stopped crying since disembarking from the train, Melania should get into one of the trucks with all the children and women in their family so that they could ride to the village more quickly. Dmytro, Seman, and Wasyl would finish the trip in the family’s wagons along with all their belongings and farm animals. Dmytro’s parents and siblings would also ride in their wagons to Troska. Melania climbed into the front seat of the first army truck with her two daughters. They sat right next to the Polish driver, who looked at colicky Julia with some concern. Maria and Hania climbed into the back of the vehicle. Also aboard the two trucks were other former inhabitants of Smerekowiec with all their baggage: Seman’s widowed brother Danko, a man named Pawlo Pupczyk with his young daughter and elderly mother, and a blacksmith named Marko Astrab with his son and four nephews. Marko Astrab had agreed to watch over his nephews so that they would not have to walk the approximately twenty kilometers to Troska alongside their parents’ packed wagon. The boys’ father promised the four of them that he and their mother would arrive in Troska by wagon not long after they did and gave each son a bread roll to eat during the trip. The boys devoured their rolls before the trucks even pulled away from the train station. A New Home in the Recovered Territories? 121 The two trucks set out for Troska in the late afternoon. They rode slowly through villages and towns with brick buildings that had been inhabited by Germans just a few years earlier but now possessed Polish names, like Ko˙zuchów instead of Freystadt in Schlesien and Mirocin Dolny instead of Nieder Herzogswaldau. They drove down tree-lined roads that were twice as wide as those in the Lemko region, remarking that it seemed as if the Germans had spared no land to build those roads. When the trucks passed some people working in the fields, Marko Astrab’s son saw a boy taking cows out to pasture and recognized him as a former classmate who had been relocated earlier. He shouted the boy’s name from the truck, but the classmate only managed to wave before the vehicles drove past him and he was out of sight. As they then rode through a village called Jarogniewice, Melania saw a woman outside wearing a traditional Lemko corset over her blouse and an apron over her pleated skirt. From the front seat, Melania turned and pointed out the woman to her mother, noting that she had to be from the Lemko region too. Not far past Jarogniewice, the trucks turned onto a clay pathway bordered by overgrown brush. They approached a wooden bridge, which crossed the narrow section of a river, and the driver of the first truck stopped in front of it. Worried that the bridge, which was built for wagons, could not bear the weight of the army trucks, he refused to drive over it. He told all the passengers that they would have to get out and walk the last hundred meters to Troska, carrying whatever baggage they had. Marko Astrab protested, though, declaring that if the bridge collapsed from the weight, then it collapsed, and so be it. He had lost everything already, so it did not matter much if he lost whatever was left, but he would not carry his many suitcases and sacks the rest of the way. He examined the bridge together with the driver, eventually convincing him to finish transporting all their belongings to Troska as long as the passengers, particularly the women and children, were not in the vehicles as they crossed the bridge. Melania climbed out of the truck with her daughters and walked toward Troska with Julia now calmly lying in her arms and Nadia toddling by her side. As they entered the village on foot, the first thing that Melania saw were brick houses...

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