Volunteer Alina Filipowicz, born on 3 January 1924 in Lublin.
I lived in Mancewicze, the Łuniniec district, the Polesie voivodeship, from where, on 13 April 1940, I was deported along with my mother and siblings to the Soviet Union – the Aktobe Oblast, the Rodnikovka region, the Rodnikovka kolkhoz. The kolkhoz was peopled mainly by Kazakh tribe members and displaced Russians, with whom we worked. There were lots of communists. They disseminated communist propaganda and persecuted us, our language and our religion. We were compelled to attend various talks and lectures. The conditions in which we lived were very bad – poor food, work quotas set too high for any human being to meet, and low pay, dependent on the yield of crops. I was put to work building a road leading to Aktobe. The scorching sun made the work very hard. We dug trenches and transported stones in special wheelbarrows. Because the work was heavy, it was assigned mostly to the Poles. I can attach a photograph as evidence. Living conditions were very harsh. The buildings in which we were lodged were made from earth and clay. Their hosts, with whom we shared the buildings, charged us from 80 to 100 rubles per month. We heated them with fuel made from straw and manure; firewood was scarce, for we lived in the steppe, where wood was practically unavailable. All these factors made our conditions harsh. Many suffered from cold, both Poles and others.
We were regularly summoned by the NKVD for interrogations.
Medical assistance was very poor. The small hospital was hardly able to admit those who were seriously ill, and the Russians were given priority over other patients. Exhaustion and undernourishment caused a lot of deaths, mainly among the elderly and children. Before the outbreak of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, we were in mail contact with Poland. Later it came to an abrupt end because of the strict censorship and the great distance that separated us from the home country. Contact with the city was also bad, practically non-existent.