1. Personal data:
Gunner Ryszard Kozicz, 45 years old, forestry engineer, district forest manager with the State Forests, married with two children aged 8 and 5.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
On 10 February 1940, I was deported with my family to Vologda Oblast. At 4.00 a.m., an NKVD sergeant and two militiamen stormed into my flat and, having searched it for weapons, gave us two hours to pack our belongings. They promised to place my wife, who was suffering from severe uterine hemorrhaging, in the hospital in Rafałówka, but when we reached the station, the escorting officers turned a deaf ear to all our appeals and pushed my wife into the goods wagon.
We took our clothes, underwear, linen and some food. It weighted more or less 150 kilograms (flour, kasha, sugar and lard).
36 people travelled crammed in one stuffy wagon for two weeks. We arrived via Arkhangelsk at a train station in Morzhenga, 60 kilometers beyond Vologda. Then we covered 240 kilometers in horse drawn carts; we travelled for 11 days in severe frost. Three small children from our transport died on the way.
3. Name of the camp, prison, or forced labor site:
On 7 March 1940, we arrived at the forest hamlet of Obizkhovo [?], Babushkinsky District, Vologda Oblast.
4. Description of the camp, prison etc.:
We were placed in a one-story barrack, barrack no. 2, in a room 2.7 x 3 x 2.4 meters large. Two families were crammed in there, that is, 10 people. It was done on purpose, to humiliate the “masters”, as other deportees had more spacious rooms. Housing conditions were difficult; the room was squalid and horribly infested with bugs. We had to keep the lights on at night while exterminating the vermin in great numbers. Children were to be pitied most, as the insects attacked them so viciously that we removed them from the beds and bodies of our children in handfuls. There was no rest after our toil as lumberjacks. Only when summer came did our existence became more bearable, when the women plastered the walls with clay and whitewashed the rooms.
5. The composition of prisoners of war, inmates, exiles:
The people deported to the above-mentioned hamlet were civilian and military settlers and employees of the forest administration, both state- and private-owned. There were 96 families – 610 people, including 83 Polish families (560 people) and 13 Ukrainian and Belarusian families (50 people). The intellectual level was low, as there were many farmers, and 70 percent were semi-literate. The moral standing was high, only thanks to the Polish women, who would organize collective prayers and celebrate Catholic holidays despite hostile propaganda. The attitude of the deportees towards the few members of the intelligentsia was generally favorable; only four turncoats, snitches, were collecting information and ratting on us to the NKVD. As a result of their efforts, their brothers ended up in Soviet prisons, where worse torture and torments lay in store for them. Here are the surnames of the Soviet spies: 1. Platoon Leader Stanisław Burzyński, 2. Artillery Officer Leon Kołodziński (both in the Polish Army), 3. Andrzej Żyłko, 4. Jan Kalenik.
6. Life in the camp, prison:
At first we earned from 2.5 to 3.5 rubles, as we lacked skill and physical strength, but we improved with practice and managed to double our pay to 7 rubles. We could buy only bread with that money, and in order to buy some food from the canteen we had to sell our underwear, clothes and linens.
For a year we worked at a slow pace, and the Soviet slave drivers accused us of not wanting to work, of not working hard enough, of sabotaging our work etc.
Finally we saw the results of this. On 28 March 1941, at night, following a thorough search, five of us were arrested: engineer Kleski, Kaliński, Paszkowski, Rozumski and I, and we were driven on foot to the town of Totma, situated 28 kilometers away. We were put in prison, in a political division, in cell no. 9. I was one of eight persons placed in a small cell with two beds. Four of us slept on two iron beds, and four on the floor by the entrance. I shared the cell with a State Forest ranger, Woskresieński, two Jews from Warsaw and four Russians. The investigation was completed on 4 June 1941. We were not taken for labor, and we received meager food: fish soup, kasha, 650 grams of bread. On 29 June a new cellmate told us about the outbreak of the war with the Germans. This news raised our hopes that we might regain our freedom. Towards the end of the investigation I was repeatedly interrogated at night for 7–8 hours straight. The investigating judge threatened me with a revolver and called me “proklyatyy pol’skiy had”. I wasn’t beaten. On 24 June, there was a trial – or rather a mockery of a trial, unheard of in human history. Even our court-appointed defender incriminated us, asking us questions in line with the NKVD’s instructions. The gravely ill engineer Kleski was dragged to the trial half-dead. It was a pitiful and unforgettable scene of human bestiality. After a few weeks of illness, engineer Kleski died and was buried in the prison cemetery. Kleski, Paszkowski and I were sentenced to ten years of forced labor, and Kaliński and Rozumski to eight. After the trial we were placed in a small cell; there were 23 of us, the cell was so stuffy that we could scarcely breathe, and we were starved. We received watery soup boiled from fish heads and 450 grams of bread.
On 12 July we were deported to a corrective colony in Vologda. We toiled very hard at unloading wood from barges and unloading wagons, for 13–14 hours per day. I was very weak; for the food we received – 600 grams of bread, some coffee and soup seasoned with oil – I was meeting 70 percent of the quota. While unloading equipment from the wagons, I developed a hernia. I had my own clothes for the entire time, and I also had my own underwear and shoes.
7. The NKVD’s attitude towards Poles:
Everywhere – both in exile and in prison – I met with hostile propaganda against Poland; they disseminated false information and lies about Poland and its government. A hostile attitude towards the Polish nation was conspicuous.
8. Medical assistance, hospitals, mortality rate:
In the hamlet, very inept medical assistance was provided by a young paramedic, some 18 years old, who didn’t have the most basic drugs at his disposal. In the first year, the mortality rate was rather low, some 10 percent, mostly the elderly and babies. It increased during the second year.
In the prison and the corrective colony, the medical assistance was even worse. There were no separate rooms for the sick, even those gravely ill, and only the dead were removed from the cells.
9. Was there any possibility of getting in contact with one’s country and family?
The NKVD commandant in the hamlet didn’t allow letters from the home country. After many efforts, I managed to get in touch with some friends of mine in the Sarny district. I received three food parcels from them. I didn’t manage to get in contact with my family.
10. When were you released and how did you manage to join the army?
I was released from the corrective colony on 1 September 1941, and on 11 October I set off with a group of 70 people to the Polish Army, but we were not admitted and were sent to the Uzbek Republic. I worked with groups of others in several kolkhozes. Food was lousy: 300 grams of rice or else wholemeal flour. We suffered the greatest privations in January 1942: hunger, lice, and scabies. On 8 February 1942, I appeared before the draft board in Tashkent and was accepted into the Polish Army, which saved me from imminent death.
9 March 1943