Volunteer Weronika Dziem, born on 18 November 1925 in Podhajce, Staff Platoon of the Women’s Auxiliary Service at the Staging Area Command.
On 10 February 1940, I was deported to Russia together with my father and my sister, who stayed behind in Lwów on the way. At the station in Budniki we were loaded into goods wagons, and we travelled in them for three weeks without coal, water, etc.
On 27 February we arrived in Pervomaisk hamlet, Sverdlovsk Oblast, and two days later we were employed in the gold mines.
The work was very hard, as I had to earn bread for my elderly father, who was ill and died a few months later. I was left alone in inconsolable grief at the age of forty. And so I worked hard until the amnesty was proclaimed.
Following the amnesty I left for Tashkent, from where I was sent to a kolkhoz. I worked there with cows. The work was hard and various diseases spread due to the lack of medical assistance and bread. Three months later I went to Oter [?], from where I went abroad with the Polish army.