CATEGORY: ALMOST DIED
WHERE: Border between Soviet Union & Czechoslovakia ( 2 countries which no longer exist)
WHEN: Night, October, 1972
AGE: 19 years old


I was finally leaving Soviet Union. The train stopped at the customs building in Chop. All the families on the train were told to unload their possessions and take them to customs. The piles of luggage on the platform were enormous. My father told my mother that he was going to look for a cart. A minute later I said to her: "I’ll go help him". I ran to the end of the train standing opposite of ours, grabbed the train car for support and jumped off the platform onto the railroad tracks. As soon as my feet touched the ground I noticed that my hand just started moving toward my body. I heard my mother’s voice screaming my name. I realized that the train was moving and that I was about to die. I was standing with my back to the platform, which came up to my shoulders. There was no time to turn around and climb out. All these thoughts past through my mind in a fraction of a second.

The next thing I remember is me standing on the platform, with the train cars flying past, inches from my face.

I don’t know how I got back onto that platform.

PS: When the train started moving (without any notice or signal), one of our luggage trunks, which was leaning against it, slipped down off the platform and I had to hold my mother back from her desperate attempts to retrieve it. All the cars of that train passed by without hitting the trunk, except the last one. It was spectacular. The trunk flew high in the air, opened and spilled our precious possessions over the rails.

A thought crossed my mind that it could have been my body instead, a minute earlier.