1. Personal data:
Platoon Sergeant Jan Gajdowski, a farmer by occupation, born in 1904, married.
2. Methods of interrogation and torture used during the examination:
I was arrested on 23 October 1939 in my own home and placed in the prison in Białystok. I remained there for eleven months. The Soviets used the following interrogation methods: 1) They threatened me that I would be shot or sentenced to long-term imprisonment, 2) They said that my family would be deported, 3) They shouted at me and hurled abuse at my nation, 4) They made full use of the fact that I don’t know Russian, 5) I would be woken up at night, 6) They threatened me with the punishment cell (a small booth with an opening in the ceiling, through which water dripped onto your head; I was locked up there twice, for six hours each time, stark naked).
During the examination they used the following methods of torture: they beat me on the neck, arms and legs with a rubber truncheon, and also hit me with the butt of a Browning pistol over my entire body. After one such interrogation I noticed that Jeszeła, a fellow prisoner and a railwayman from Białystok, had lost his left eye.
3. Procedure applied by the court in the course of the examination and during pronouncement of the verdict:
The court did not hear me or ask me any questions. All that it did was sentence me in absentia to ten years of forced labor.
4. I remember instances of people being murdered:
1. An official of the Social Security Agency in Białystok, Mr Muszyński, died soon after being hit by a Soviet soldier with the butt of his rifle, shortly after leaving the camp for work. 2. A teacher from the Wilno Region, Józef Stelmach (killed as described in Point 1). 3. Mr Rudzieński, a laborer from the district of Wysokie Mazowieckie, whose ribs were broken by NKVD functionaries while he was locked up in the punishment cell for non-fulfillment of the quota.
5. Life in forced labor camps, the organization thereof, and work norms:
a) Township and area/region: The Komi Republic – peaty and swampy taiga, with loads of mosquitoes and biting flies.
b) Living conditions: initially, I lived in the open (for three weeks), and thereafter in a shelter, with the temperature falling to minus 50 degrees Celsius and lower; I never lived in a barrack. For a long time, I slept on the wet, bare ground, covering myself with a donkey jacket; only later did I get a pallet made from logs.
c) Food: what you received depended on whether you had carried out the norm. Breakfast: one half liter of fatless soup, for dinner the same, and for supper – the same as for breakfast and dinner. In the summer, I would be given food three times a day, while in winter only twice. The quantity of bread that you received also depended on how much you had worked. When the camp was still being built, they would give me 120 grams of whole-meal biscuits.
d) Working conditions: in the swamps and peat bogs, up to your neck in snow, with the temperature falling to minus 50 or 60 degrees Celsius, or in torrential rain, during the spring thaws, etc.; I worked in such conditions for a year, with no days off and absolutely no rest.
e) Norms: carting away 7 cubic meters of earth to a distance of 50 m on a wheelbarrow; arranging 7 cubic meters of wood from trees that you had cut down yourself, delimbing and ripping the logs, collecting the branches, placing them on a pile and burning them; digging a drainage ditch with a length of 4 meters, width of 2.5 meters, and depth of 1.5 meters.
f) Clothes: initially, I worked in my own clothes, however later – in winter – I received quilted trousers with openings, a tattered quilted jacket (scorched), shoes made from old tires, and a quilted cap. I was not given any underwear.
g) Hygienic conditions: 120 people lived crowded into a single shack. Filth and lice, for there was no bathing or washing of clothes.
h) Working time: in the summer – 14 hours, in winter – 8. After the German-Soviet war broke out, the working time was extended to 16 hours.
i) Cultural life and entertainment – none. When we walked through the gate, someone would play on a concertina.
j) Keeping in touch with the home country: My family had been deported to north Kazakhstan in April 1940. I had no contact with them.
k) Attitude of the Soviet authorities to Poles: unfriendly, and they would ridicule Poland at every opportunity (saying that you would never return there, that the country had ceased to exist).
l) Wages: during my detention in the forced labor camp I didn’t receive any cash remuneration for my work.
m) Communist propaganda: not present. However, during the very frequent searches they would confiscate all and any religious objects and destroy them before the inmates’ eyes.
n) Mortality rate in the camp: approximately 30 percent. The majority of deaths were caused by scurvy. I also fell ill with this disease, suffering practically throughout my entire period of detention in the camps; I was covered in sores. To this day I carry marks caused by scurvy.
Organization of the camp: I was imprisoned in two different types of camps: the abbreviated name of the first is Sevzheldorlag [forced labor camps administered by the Northern Railway Camp system], while the others were called Pechora Lags. The latter were divided into branches, and these into colonies. The commandant of a colony could be a deportee or a free man. Administrative functions in the camp were performed by the prisoners themselves. This means that common criminals would function as officials. The prisoners would be divided into working brigades headed by brigade overseers and leaders of ten-man groups.
6. Life in the prison:
I was detained in the prison in Białystok from 23 October 1939 until 20 August 1940. The conditions were terrible. My cell housed 115 inmates, whereas during the Second Polish Republic it would have contained no more than twenty. Filth, lice, stuffiness, insufficient medical care (lack of drugs), being allowed to relieve yourself only twice daily. Everything was organized as in a labor camp. During my entire incarceration I had only one bath.
The food was the same as in the labor camps. Just 400 grams of wholemeal bread. Soup – a watery porridge or flour dissolved in water – was given twice daily (obviously fatless).
Social composition of prisoners: varied. The majority were Poles accused of engaging in political activities. A small number were detained for crossing the German-Soviet border, while quite a few had been serving sentences during the period of existence of the Polish state. The latter were rather arrogant. Byelorussian nationalists – also represented in the prison population – behaved in the same way.
The types of crimes committed varied considerably. There were people whose sole objective was to inflict suffering on others and to thieve – first and foremost to the detriment of us Poles, at the time deprived of proper state care.