On the night of 17/18 September 1939, the highest state authorities, led by President Ignacy Mościcki and Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, left the borders of the Republic. Together with thousands of civilian and military refugees, they left for Romania via the border bridge at Kuty nad Czeremoszem. Today, all that remains at this site is a ruined customs house and a fragment of the bridgehead.

Bridge over the Cheremosh
For centuries, the Cheremosh had been a natural border - before the partitions between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Duchy of Moldova, and later between the two Austrian provinces of Galicia and Bukovina. On both sides of the river were two towns that were local trade and service centres - Kuty and Vyšnica. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the river became the state border again, and Vyšininka, together with the whole Bukovina, became part of Romania. A permanent wooden bridge connected the two banks even before the First World War, but it was destroyed by a flood in 1927.

In connection with plans for the development of Kut and, more broadly, the whole of Pokuttya, the Polish administration took as its main task the improvement of the region's transport infrastructure. Tourists who wanted to get to Kuty or nearby Kosovo in the 1920s first had to take the train to Zablotov and then travel 30 km on bad roads by wagon or lorry, replacing the bus. From the end of the 1920s until the outbreak of war, a lot was done in the region to improve the state of the roads, on which modern passenger buses began to run over time. In order to improve the export of timber from the Carpathian forests and, on the other hand, to attract tourists, the Polish administration also decided to build a railway branch connecting Kuty with the Warsaw-Lviv-Stanislavov-Chernivtsi main line. For this purpose, it was decided to use the railway line, built in Austrian times, leading along the Bukovina bank of the Čeremosh from the station Niepołokovce to Vyzhnivtsi.
In the summer of 1930, a new road-railway bridge was built connecting Kuty and Vyšnivtsy. It was built at an express pace by sappers from the 1st and 2nd Railway Bridge Battalions from Krakow and Jablonna. The approximately 300-metre-long bridge had a wooden structure with steel elements, and next to the railway track there was also a roadway and a pedestrian walkway. To honour the builders of the bridge, one of the streets in Kut was named Sapers' Street (today Sich Riflemen). Shortly after the bridge was built, the Kuty-Niepołokowce-Sniatyn line began to be used for freight transport.

In the following years, not far from the bridge, a wooden railway station building was also erected with interesting architecture referring to the art déco style and using elements of Hutsul ornamentation.

A regular passenger service to Kuty was established in autumn 1935. - The train set off from Warsaw at 3.30 p.m., after more than 9 hours of travel it was in Lviv, and at 4.36 a.m. the next day it reached the border station of Sniatyn-Zaluch. Travellers going to Kuty, after crossing the border, travelled in transit without passport control and were there at 6.53 a.m., This timetable, with minor changes, was in force in subsequent holiday seasons until 1939.

Border crossing
There was also a customs building and a border guard house at the bridge, with a modest wooden shed for most of the inter-war period. It was not until the late 1930s that it was replaced by a new, much more imposing building. It was a sturdy brick structure in the style of the then fashionable modernism with a distinctive glass protrusion where passport control could be conveniently carried out without the guard having to leave the building. Unfortunately, details of the inauguration of this building (probably around 1938-1939) or its architect are as yet unknown.

The crossing was primarily for tourism, with the highest traffic in summer and early autumn. Thanks to an agreement between Poland and Romania, tourists were able to cross the border and move within a few kilometres of it without a passport, provided a pass was issued at the Kosovo starosty (in those days, buying a passport was expensive and not everyone could afford one). Goods imported from the south of Romania and commonly sold in the shops in Vyšnica, such as sultanas, sweets and wine, were very popular among Polish tourists.
The border crossing in Kuty came alive in mid-June, around the time of the Armenian-Catholic parish fair (13 June). At that time, Polish Armenians, who had been living in Bukovina and Bessarabia for decades, flocked to Kuty in large numbers. Many of them no longer had Polish citizenship and had never lived in Kuty for long, but their ancestors, who had travelled further east and south for trade as late as the 19th century, originated from here. A tradition handed down from generation to generation called for people to come to Kuty, at least once every few years, for St Anthony's Day. He was particularly revered among Polish Armenians as the patron saint of merchants (besides, of course, restoring health and lost things). It was an opportunity to meet relatives, visit the graves of ancestors and order masses for their intentions. The indulgence was also very popular among Catholics of the Latin and Greek rites, living on both sides of the Cheremosh.

After the bridge and railway station were burnt down during the Second World War, and later after the annexation of these lands to the USSR, the customs house lost its raison d'être and was systematically degraded over the decades. Today, all that is left of it is a shell of a wall devoid of doors and windows, with the basement strewn with rubble and debris. Next to it, the remains of the bridge abutment can still be seen, i.e. a reinforced earth embankment with a stone-built pillar. With the construction of a bridge in a completely different place after the war (a few hundred metres further up the Čeremosh River), the area of the former border crossing has been moved away from the main roads, and in its vicinity there are now mainly warehouses and small production and service facilities.

September 1939
As a result of the German army offensive, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły was forced to issue an order as early as 13 September 1939 to prepare a deep retreat of the Polish army to the so-called Romanian bridgehead. According to the Commander-in-Chief's intentions, the forces remaining in the centre of the country were to tie up the Germans for as long as possible, while the remaining groupings were to retreat towards the south-east. There - based on the Dniester River, the Carpathian Mountains and the borders of neutral Hungary and Romania - the Polish Army was to regroup and wait until the announced general offensive of France and Great Britain on the Western Front.

From 13-14 September, representatives of the highest military and civilian authorities were located in Pokucie, locating themselves primarily in Kolomyia, Kosów and Kuty. Kosiv became the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief's Staff and the Ministry of Military Affairs, while Kuty became the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the diplomatic corps.

After a series of defeats, there were some signs of optimism in the Polish staff on 16 September. In the opinion of officers from Marshal Rydz-Śmigły's closest entourage, the German troops were already exhausted by two weeks of heavy fighting, and by the lengthening of the supply lines they were to suffer fuel and ammunition shortages. Thus, it was considered realistic to halt the Wehrmacht's march and consolidate Polish resistance on the Dniester line. At the same time - in accordance with Allied arrangements - a general offensive should set off on the Western Front, the natural result of which would be the withdrawal of a large part of the German forces from Poland.

These hopes collapsed the next day, with the entry of the USSR into the war. Red Army units broke the resistance of the few Border Protection Corps units and within a dozen hours the first Soviet tanks were in the vicinity of the bridge at Uścieczek on the Dniester. The road to Kuty, less than 100 km from this crossing, stood open, especially as there were no Polish Army units capable of putting up serious resistance along the way.

The Polish authorities, completely surprised by the Soviet advance and placed in a hopeless situation, decided to evacuate to Romania . It was across the border bridge at Kuty that President Ignacy Mościcki, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, Prime Minister Felicjan Sławoj-Składkowski and almost his entire Cabinet left the country, along with several thousand soldiers and civilian refugees. The forges remained in Polish hands until the morning of 21 September, when the last soldiers from Major Henryk Piątkowski's covering detachment crossed the bridge to Wyżnica.