Senior private Eugeniusz Jarzębiński, born on 1 [?] November 1906, a clerk in the Social Insurance Institution [ZUS] in Lwów, unmarried; Staging Areas Communications Batallion.
When the war broke out I joined the army. I was staying in Lwów at the time after the Bolsheviks entered. On 22 September 1939, the Bolsheviks defeated us in Lwów. I used to work in the Social Insurance Institution in Lwów, and the Bolsheviks ordered us to report for work on 30 November 1939. They dismissed all the employees and left them to fend for themselves. Deprived of livelihood and having parents in Nowy Sącz, I wanted to get through to the German side. In order to do so I went from Lwów to Przemyśl. On 1 December 1939, the Bolsheviks caught me in Przemyśl on the San river and took me to prison.
In prison they starved us, providing 300 grams of bread daily and a tiny bit of soup. I saw with my own eyes how they took a Pole who was dying of hunger from our cell. On 5 January 1940, the Bolsheviks deported us from Przemyśl to Russia. In the wagon, they gave us 600 grams of bread and one salted herring. We were very cold because they didn’t give us any coal, and if they did, it wouldn’t burn. We arrived in Żytomierz on 12 January 1940, barely alive. They sent us to prison right after. When we arrived at the prison the Bolsheviks sent us to the NKVD, where they spent the whole night drafting a report. We were very cold in the cells, they didn’t give us food and there was no room to sleep, as there were two of us to each bed. Many of my fellows and I slept on the concrete, as the number of beds was insufficient. The cell’s commandant was zakluczony Bolshevik Jedwabnik, who wreaked his anger on Poles. A single day would not pass without him beating one of us up. One morning I was going to wash myself and took a pot of water. He wanted to kill me for that; he threw a porcelain bowl at me. I was kept in Żytomierz until the end of August, and then I was sent to a prison in Niżyn. When we were on a train, they didn’t give us anything to eat for two days. It wasn’t until the third day when we got a piece of bread and a herring.
In Niżyn, they kept us in prison for two months, and then sent me to a prison in Kharkiv, where I was held for four days. From Kharkiv, they sent me to labor camps. We all wanted to die in the wagons [during the journey]. The journey took two weeks. When we arrived at night, they told us to walk 10 kilometers to a stopping point. On the way the Bolsheviks kept the dogs behind us, so that had someone slipped on the road, they would have set a dog on them, and it would’ve bitten them and torn up everything they were wearing. The place where we were going to be living in was called Izora [?] camp. I was wearing clothes and a coat, and the camp foreman wanted to steal them from me, but he failed, so he sent me to Sosma [?] camp, where they ordered me to give my clothes and coat to the bookkeepers, and gave me some tatters, so ragged that they kept sweeping down. When I suffered frostbite in my toe they sent me back to Izora [?] camp for treatment. I wanted to get my coat and clothes back, so I went to the camp foreman. After a couple of days, that same foreman who’d wanted to take my clothes and coat from me, moved me to Tobis camp, 50 kilometers away.
They chased us out to work at 5 o’clock in the morning, with the temperature reaching minus 40 degrees [Celsius]. I was working as a nawalszczik, they gave me three carts for loading wood. So when I loaded one cart, another one was already approaching, so that I didn’t have any time for rest. We would walk 10 kilometers to the forest and back. The conditions in the forest were terrible, as we walked up to our waist in snow looking for wood. When the spring came, they sent me to a horse post, where the snow wouldn’t melt until the end of May. When we arrived at the post, nothing was there apart from a single barrack with a roof full of holes. We had to live in it. Eight of us Poles had to bring the wood on sledges, while the Russian zakluczeni were just starting to build a real barrack. When they finished, they built a sawmill. They assigned me to work there. When the summer came, the mosquitoes bit so hard that you couldn’t keep them off, and it was even worse if you wore a mask. Once, I had it on at work when a mosquito bit me. I couldn’t see with my eye for two weeks. The worst part was bringing the provisions: wherever the horses couldn’t get through, I had to carry the provisions for two kilometers. We walked to get the provisions through the hilly forests, full of snowdrifts. I would often fall into such snowdrifts and wouldn’t be able to get out.