During the winter of 1943 Eugene, his brother, and their partisan commander were offered shelter by a family that was close with Eugene’s before the war. They were betrayed and only Eugene escaped, though he contracted stomach typhus from running back to his unit through the snow:

“They told me my brother was killed, the other one and the commander. And I told not to tell anybody, I want to go to the village to see the 2 brothers who did the job. I came there, I find them there in the house, I pulled them out of the house, I killed both of them.”

“In June ’44 we was united with the Russian army. They give us new uniforms. They put 10,000 and new from the hospital everything and they sent us to the front line. That was the idea, Stalin’s policy. They promise miracle, you’ll go, you save Russia, we’ll look after you. They didn’t have what to give. And they sent 10,000 partisans to the front line.”

Eugene participated in The Battle Of Konigsberg with the heavy machine gun division: “I went to heavy machine gun. On each corner of the division there were machine guns on little wheels, 250 bullets in each section. 2 people – one is carrying the bullets, one remain with the machine gun. And I was behind the machine gun”.

After the war, Eugene immigrated to Canada and ran a furniture business in Toronto.