Senior rifleman Tadeusz Czajkowski, 6th Tank Battalion.
I was arrested in Lwów on 22 October 1940. My arrest was carried out by the NKVD. When I arrived at the prison, I was stripped of all my personal belongings, for which I was issued a kvitantsiya [receipt]. Alas, I never set eyes on my things again.
Following my conviction, I left in a transport for the prison in Dnipropetrovsk. We were marched along the streets, our clothes in tatters, and the local populace laughing at us. After three weeks in the prison we were sent for labor to the Finnish border. Our journey lasted for 15 days, and our food rations consisted of 300 grams of bread and a few herrings. We couldn’t even dream about water. We received snow, which we had to melt on the stove to drink. We received a sufficient amount of water only once, in Moscow, and of course only when we raised an outcry. We reached our destination in January. It was freezing cold there, and we were told to wait for them to check all the surnames. After three hours of waiting we were stuffed into palatkas [overcoats used as tents]. A package with underwear and shoes [that had been left] at the entrance to the palatka was taken away from me. A week later I saw the camp head wearing my shoes, but unfortunately I couldn’t do anything; a great many things went missing and all remonstrations were to no avail. I learned from some Soviet thieves that it was the guards who bought stolen items. I was issued a uniform of a torn overcoat and rubber shoes. Then all my civilian garments were taken away and I never saw them again. I worked at a railway track. The work was very hard; we had to remove rocky soil with wheelbarrows that kept breaking, so I was constantly receiving food from the so-called penal caldron (300 grams of bread, soup twice a day). We lived in the tents without any bedding. One stove per tent was not enough to keep us warm, so I caught a cold and contracted pneumonia. Gravely ill, I was transported to Pechora (1,500 kilometers to the east of the Finnish border). Later, as I was utterly exhausted, I spent three months in the hospital. After discharge I resumed work at the railway track. The work was even harder there, because I had to perform it wading knee-deep in mud. I wore my own underwear from the beginning of my exile until the very end, that is, until our release. It was so horribly lice-infested that I couldn’t sleep at night, and during the day I would kill the lice instead of working.
I remember that during five months I was only four times in the bathhouse, and my things weren’t disinfected even once. I was constantly listed on the board in the colony as otkaznik, because I couldn’t meet the quota. The amount of work prescribed was too much even for the Russians, but they had the amounts they were short supplemented on paper by those who supervised the quotas.
At the outbreak of the War all the Poles were imprisoned in a separate colony, where we received virtually no food at all. We received 200 grams of biscuits and some tea for two– three days. This state of affairs continued until the amnesty was proclaimed.
L.S., 27 March 1943