Official stamp, 8 March 1943
Volunteer Wanda Bednarska, born on 16 June 1912 in Suchedniów, Sandomierz voivodeship, a nurse with the emergency ambulance service of the Polish Red Cross, married to a military settler.
I was deported from Radziwiłłów near Brody, wołyńskie voivodeship, on 10 February 1940. I was taken with my entire family to the Lenski District in the Arkhangelsk Oblast, to the Krystoforowski Lesopunkt [forestry camp] in the settlement of Szuszagowo.
Initially, I worked at wood processing, and thereafter I performed maintenance work on the railway line of the Lesopunkt. I left following the amnesty of 28 August 1941, intending to get through to the newly forming Polish Army. On 23 September I arrived in Buzuluk, and on 15 October 1941 I was accepted to the Women’s Auxiliary Service, where I worked as a nurse in the center. On 15 January 1942, I was ordered to join the ambulance team accompanying a group of civilians who were to be transported to the south of the USSR. We arrived in Guzar on 23 January. We worked to combat a typhus epidemic that was spreading alarmingly fast, under extremely difficult conditions: no halls for patients, an insufficient number of doctors, hunger, impossible sanitary conditions, and a lack of regular medical personnel. On 18 February I was taken ill with typhus. Once I recovered, I was assigned to the Garrison Hospital of Brigade District “A”, Detachment II. I continued to work in exceedingly dire conditions. On 15 August, I was evacuated together with the hospital to Iran, where I worked at Evacuation Hospital No. 1 in Pahlevi. Thereafter we were transferred from Iran to Iraq, where I was assigned to Military Hospital No. 3.