1. Personal data:
Józef Andruszkiewicz, platoon leader, 50 years of age, police officer.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
On 20 September 1939 I was part of the unit defending Wilno against the Bolsheviks. In the Porubanek airport near Wilno, I was disarmed, arrested and imprisoned in the Łukiszki prison in Wilno.
3. Name of the camp, prison or forced labor site:
The camp in the Komi ASSR, Irodny LO industry.
4. Description of the camp, prison etc. (camp grounds, buildings, living conditions, hygiene):
Impassable forests – the taiga and tundra. Wooden barracks swarming with bedbugs and, in summer, with gnats.
5. Composition of prisoners-of-war, prisoners, and exiles (nationality, a type of crime, intellectual and moral level, mutual relations etc.):
The prisoners included Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, the Komi people, Armenians, the Uzbek, and Georgians. There were both political prisoners and criminals convicted of violent crimes. While political prisoners treated the Poles quite well, those convicted of other crimes were indecent and mean in their treatment of us.
6. Life in the camp, prison etc. (daily routine, working conditions, work quotas, remuneration, food, clothes, social life etc.):
The cells were crammed with people, like herrings in a barrel. Louse disinfestation was carried out until noon and in the afternoon. Everyone was required to kill two hundred lice. Windows were boarded up and painted over. We lived as if in a tomb of the living. Interrogations took place at night. As forced laborers we worked twelve hours a day. Forest work, tree-stump clearing. We cut the wood into meter-long pieces, standing up to our necks in snow. Work quotas were impossible to fill. Digging sewage trenches in ground frozen a meter down. Work quota: six cubic meters. Those who managed to meet the quota received 800 grams of bread, and those who didn’t – 250 to 300.
7. The NKVD’s attitude towards Poles (ways of interrogating, torture, punishments, communist propaganda, information about Poland):
The NKVD simply persecuted us. We, the Poles, got on well with each other, but the relations between us and non-Polish prisoners were bad.
They said: let these bourgeois see what it is like to work hard. And to me they would say: it is different from writing reports. Russians convicted of "political" crimes were always fearful of something, but treated us well. The criminals, in turn, kept reminding us Poles of 1920. Interrogations were carried out at night. We were beaten, tortured and locked up in dark cells. (Uzhe cebya Polshy bolshe ne videt).
8. Medical assistance, hospitals, mortality rate (give the names of the deceased):
Hospitals were overcrowded with the sick. People died mainly from hunger. Some were killed by guards while working. The latter killed two men: lieutenant Krępski from Lwów, I forgot his surname, and a Jew, a Hebrew teacher from a high school in Kock. A Polish writer, Marian Czuchodórski from Lwów, can provide more detailed information, only in 6 [battalion?].
9. What, if any, was your contact with your country and your family:
We weren’t allowed to send letters from prison for the whole year. Upon my arrival at the camp I got in touch with my brother in Białystok, and later with my family whom the Soviets had deported to Kazakhstan.
10. When were you released and how did you manage to join the army?
I was released in January 1942, but I wasn’t allowed to leave the Komi ASSR. However, in May I escaped to Kotlas, where I joined the army at the Polish representation.
6 March 1943