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saw some patches of blood where people had been killed. Everyone was wondering from one
barracks to another as if in a daze, looking for his or her families. Some of the people had lost their
husbands, some their children and some their wives." - The Last Secret. Lord Bethell
On June 2nd, the soldiers were able to dispatch 1,858 Cossack civilians and on June, 3rd a further
1,487. Captain J.V Baker was the British officer at the actual hand over.
"As each train arrived the Soviet soldiers would march down the length of it and station themselves,
two men opposite each truck, about 30 or 40 trucks per train, about thirty people per truck. At the
word of command they undid the padlocks and let the people out. Baker's only job was to count the
people, to check the numbers against his list and hand over the equivalent number of ration packages.
He was disgusted by the state of the trucks. The trains had left in the morning and they had arrived at
seven or eight o'clock each evening. They just had little gratings, barred gratings for ventilation.
There were men, women and children in the trucks, but the only sanitation they had was a galvanised
dustbin.
It was not an uncommon sight to find dead bodies in the trucks. I can't give numbers, because I didn't
go along inspecting the whole train, but I would say at an estimate that there were seven or eight
bodies in each train on arrival. One of them had managed to cut his throat somehow or other with a
piece of barbed wire. In other cases they managed to strangle themselves with scarves or pieces of
material twisted and fashioned into a rope. The others in the trucks could possibly have stopped this
happening, but they probably thought, 'if there's someone wants to kill himself, maybe that's the best
way out.'"
REFUGEES MACHINE-GUNNED
"The prisoners were treated coarsely but not brutally, at least not in Baker's presence. 'They were
pushed and shoved, but there was no resistance, no fighting or trying to get back or away. They were
all completely docile, resigned to their fate.' The soldiers collected them all quickly into groups and
marched them away. Baker says, 'some of them didn't get very far, I'm afraid. At the back of the
station there was a wood, a copse, and they seemed to be marched behind this copse. Shortly
afterwards there were quite a number of sustained bursts of machine-gun fire. I can't say for certain
what happened, because I couldn't see the shooting, but I am pretty sure that a lot of them were shot
there and then, not on the siding itself but just around at the back of the wood.'"
The Reverend Kenneth Tyson, the battalion's padre described how, "many soldiers had been to see
him in the previous forty-eight hours, gravely disturbed at the thought that they had used such
violence against women and children, and that they had sent thousands of harmless people to their
deaths."
"An Austrian railway official ran up to me and asked me to come and take a look at the train. I went
into one of the carriages and found the place a total shambles. The whole train was bespattered with
blood. They were open plan carriages and I remember the bloodstains where bodies had been dragged
right down the corridor between the seats and down three or four steps. The lavatories were
absolutely covered with blood and it looked as if people had locked themselves in, presumably to
commit suicide."
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