1. Personal Data (name, surname, rank, age, profession, marital status):
Józef Makowski, 30 years old, locksmith & mechanic, single, military brigadier.
In 1939, after the “Budsław” Battalion of the Border Protection Corps was scattered near Worniany, Wileńskie voivodeship, I was stopped by the red patrol in Antokolskie Street in Wilno; I escaped and crossed the Lithuanian border on 23 September, where I was interned in the camps at Kołotowo, Wiłkomierz, and Wiłkowyszki.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
During the Russian occupation of Lithuania in July 1940.
3. Name of the camp, prison or forced labor site:
Yukhnov internment camp; the Kola Peninsula – Ponoy – Suzdal.
4. Description of the camp, prison, etc. (grounds, buildings, housing conditions, hygiene):
a) The camp was situated in Yukhnov, in the former tuberculosis sanatorium of Pavlishev Bor, Smolensk Oblast. The area was about 200 to 400 meters, surrounded with barbed wire and watchtowers, lit with searchlights at night. There were around 2,7 thousand people in the camp. Kola Peninsula – Ponoy. Wet tundra.
b) Housing was very poor, initially I lived in a square-shaped park building, where the windows did not match the proportions of the area; in summer at 5 p.m., in order to reach one’s bed – which didn’t have any straw – you had to light matches. Apart from that, the room was really wet, with a moldy smell. Later I lived in a dry building, but there were 40 people living in an eight-meter cell without any way of controlling the heat in winter, so sudden changes of temperature caused toothaches and headaches.
During the transport to the North I was in the surroundings of Murmansk – Cape Green (Zielenyj Mys) – in a room in a camp for zaklyuchennykh [prisoners]. We had to sleep in turns due to lack of space. Both in Yukhnov and in Murmans there were millions of bedbugs. In Murmansk, together with the melting snow, the sewage flowed out from the latrines from beneath the floor of our quarters. While staying in the peninsula, lack of room forced us to dig holes that we covered with sheets, layering the bottom with moss.
c) In Yukhnov there was a bath, a disinfector and a laundry that we used every 10 days, with enough soap. Lice were a rarity in the camp.
5. The composition of POWs, prisoners, exiles (nationality, categories of crimes, intellectual and moral standing, mutual relations etc.):
a) Nationalities: Poles with a few Jewish, Ukrainian and Belarussian individuals, everybody speaking Polish. We hadn’t committed any crimes apart from not going along with the communist propaganda.
b) Intellectual standing among the majority was high, the rest – average; there was self-study through mutual aid in spite of tough conditions. Moral standing was high, especially in critical moments: the celebration of a National Holiday below decks on the [ship] “Klara Zetkin”. We showed an unshakable faith in the victory of our allies, with a strong manifestation of joy before the radio speaker after the British triumphs in North Africa in 1940.
c) Mutual relations were generally very good, all class antagonisms between different social groups vanished behind bars. Having said that, I will not mention a few individuals, led by a teacher, Mołodeczna Dobrowolski, who created their own community under the slogan “Through Red Poland to Freedom”. I could give further details, some of those people are actually serving in our army. Other than that, laborers of section II from Baranowicze were snitching on each other. Besides this, members of the Dobrowolski’s group stood out because of their rush to work, forcing us to work even when the authorities weren’t making us do so. They called us “Polish pigs” more than once. They were using such methods to influence us.
6. Life in the camp, prison etc. (daily routine, working conditions, work quotas, remuneration, food, clothes, social and cultural life etc.):
a) A day in the Yukhnov camp was organized in a military way, according to a trumpet signal: 6 o’clock wake-up call; 7.00 – report, status check by the duty officer; 9.00 until 12.00 – work on camp construction or other things; 12.00 to 14.00 – lunch break; 14:00 to 17:00 – as before noon; 21:00 – curfew. When we were moved to the Kola Peninsula, all these patterns vanished. Work was from 6.00 a.m. until 6.00 p.m., or from 6.00 pm to 6.00 a.m. at an airport construction site. Leaving and arriving at work, counting us a few times, took two more hours. At first the labor would go on without any break, later a one hour break after six hours of work was introduced. The work consisted of collecting turf, collecting and removing rocks and stones; twelve hours of night shift, often accompanied by constant drizzling, with no way of warming oneself or drying one’s clothes, or having a hot drink, gave our faces an earthy color. The quotas for every two people were: cutting out 76 square meters of turf, sometimes up to half a meter thick, with a tremendous amount of dwarf birch roots, and taking it out of the worksite, or removing stones and putting them in piles. The tools we were equipped with were absolutely unfit for this kind of works (gigantic shovels and crowbars) and allowed us, in the best case scenario, to fill 30 per cent of the quota. All the work had to be done without any remuneration, it wasn’t until our dismissal that we were paid 500 rubles each thanks to reaching an agreement.
The question of clothing was an exceptional burden for us. At the beginning, during the disinfection with hot air, some of our clothes were burned and others damaged so badly that they fell apart after a few weeks. Supplies came only on special occasions; it happened that among the cadets who had left Poland with inappropriate clothes, they would lie on the bunks only in their underwear and go to the lavatory in a borrowed coat. Footwear was initially not provided and not mended at all, we made soles from military belts, or we wore clogs. After arriving in the peninsula we were supplied with kufajka [quilted] clothes, shoes were given exceptionally. Sometimes on the way to work we had to walk through marshes where the water was ankle deep.
Throughout my whole time in Russia, food rations caused constant starvation. In the Yukhnov camp we were given 800 grams of bread (although baked in such a way that it consisted of water to a large extent), half a liter of soup made from millet groats, oat or potatoes with salted fish in such a condition that the odor didn’t permit eating it. Meat (available only in exceptional cases) was either past its time or consisted of meat scraps from heads and legs of cattle. Oil was used as a fat so scarcely that it’s not worth mentioning. Lack of vegetables was one of the reasons that night-blindness became widespread in the camp. After arrival in the Kola Peninsula, my working site did not have a kitchen at all, so after 14 hours of work you had to cook in a small flask, over the green branches of a birch brought from the site. Our food supplies were delivered on the backs of our cadets, 30 kilos each, through the rough, pathless terrain of the tundra. The bread rations we received were from around 300 to 800 grams, depending on how much they had baked in the nearby kolkhoz. Dry provisions, which we were allowed for cooking, were [fragment missing] scarce, for example: seven raw potatoes, 500 grams of canned food, peas.
Overall nourishment was poor, and especially, it should be stressed, during the transports. Being deported from Lithuania, after loading us on a hot July day, after walking a few kilometers, being loaded and locked up in the wagons in the scorching sun, we were given the first drop of muddy water far beyond the Polish-Russian border. And the rations at that time - salty and dried fish. During the journey over the Barents Sea from Murmansk to Ponoy (the Kola Peninsula), very small portions of water and food consisting of biscuits and canned peas, and by the end of a 10- day journey there were 2 days of absolute starvation diet (we hadn’t been provided anything, it was loaded off ship and a storm broke in the meantime). Next, on our way across the White Sea to Arkhangelsk, very poor nutrition, raw salty fish and sea water to drink. After getting off the ship, the hunger and lack of water provoked a violent demonstration within the camps. During transport by rail from Arkhangelsk to Vladimir (Russia), in response to demands for water, one of our fellow inmates was beaten up and locked in an isolation cell. After reaching Suzdal, rations of 400 grams of bread and a very thin soup twice a day.
c) Cultural life in the camp, during our stay in Yukhnov, was quite active. We had a choir of 120 people and an orchestra, which – led by conductors Dylong and Klauden – gave very good performances, more or less every two weeks. The program consisted of our folk and military songs as well as melodies of Polish composers, sometimes Russian and Ukrainian, but without a taste of propaganda. The choir conductor, our colleague Dylong, was working in difficult conditions, as the program had to undergo censorship and the words “God” or “homeland” were rejected. Sometimes he would change the words, but the audiences filled them in, giving the performers thunderous applause and throwing the NKVD into confusion. There were libraries on the camp’s premises: a state one with Russian works and propaganda magazines, and Polish books brought by us from Lithuania and exchanged with one another. We could listen to the radio, but only from Moscow. Besides that, there were newspapers on display in the camp: “ Krasnaja Zwiezda”, “ Izwiesta”, “Roboczyj Put ” and “ Prawda”.
7. The NKVD’s attitude towards Poles (interrogation methods, torture and other forms of punishment, Communist propaganda, information about Poland, etc.): Their propaganda was attempting to transform us – representatives of different social classes – into an avant-garde of the new movement, but the longer we were in the camp, the more oppositional our response was, contrary to what had been expected from us. Even initially hesitant individuals turned into fierce proponents of our principles. Right after our arrival, the attempts began. During a speech one of the NKVD officers was trying to prove that England had betrayed us, he even used the word prostitute. The response was unexpected by the NKVD: whistling and dispersion of the crowd. That topic was never discussed again publically. There were lots of propaganda movies depicting the achievements in all fields of the communist system. Before the screening of a film, a propaganda speech was given to take advantage of the gathered crowd – not enthusiasts, but curious people and commentators. As a result, the next day, when a politruk (a political worker), assigned to the campaign, came and brought up the subject, we asked him a few down-to-earth questions concerning the movie we’d seen and the numbers and slogans that came with it – as these were the usual means of conveying the message – then a [colleague] of ours would give him a true depiction of who a Soviet citizen was, or how their economic system worked, based on their own national press. Then the politruk wouldn’t show up for a few days. By debating with them, you could realize that these people had no idea about international relations. At first they took all the denial of their nonsense as a sign of propaganda, gradually they got interested in some of the things. While being in Russia, we had never gained any information about Poland and about our army after the fall of France.
8. Medical care, hospitals, mortality rate (give the names of the deceased):
Medical assistance very limited. There were a couple of feldshers in the camp with very limited treatments. Dental aid, due to lack of proper tools, solely consisted in removing teeth. There were seven cases of death within the camp premises. The hopelessly sick were taken to a hospital on a cart with no suspension, on a tuft of straw, during heavy frost, over a dozen kilometers away. There were fatalities on the way.
9. Was there any possibility of getting in contact with one’s country and family?
Correspondence was officially allowed once a month; in reality it was one letter per 11 months. Until the Russian-German war, I was able to send only four letters and I received three. They allowed correspondence using encrypted addresses. Moreover, letters were subject to censorship.
10. When were you released and how did you manage to join the army?
I was released from the NKVD’s supervision after the proclamation of the Polish-Soviet agreement, from the camp in Suzdal. I arrived in Tatishchev together with a transport of a few thousand other inmates.