1. Personal data (name, surname, rank, age, occupation, and marital status):
Second Lieutenant Franciszek Pliszka, 37 years old, state official, married.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
Arrested on 29 June 1940 in Lwów as a refugee, no reason given.
3. Name of the camp, prison, forced labor site:
Forced labor site: Korshunovka, Bodaybo district, Irkutsk Oblast.
4. Description of the camp, prison, etc. (area, buildings, living conditions, hygiene):
A small complex of wooden barracks, lit with candles, innumerable insects of all kinds in the barracks.
5. Composition of POWs, prisoners, exiles (nationality, category of crime, intellectual and moral level, mutual relations, etc.):
Teams (brigades) assigned to work in the taiga were mixed, consisting of workers, farmers, and intellectuals. Very diverse intellectual and moral level. Mutual relations marked by distrust.
6. Life at camp, prison, etc. (daily routine, working conditions, quotas, pay, food, clothing, social and cultural life):
Work at felling trees in the taiga, under conditions imposed by the authorities: every day the foreman assigned people to work arbitrarily without regard for whether someone was physically suited to a given type of work. Output quotas were impossible to fill completely, the Russians achieved them by bending the facts – they just created a fiction and deceived each other. The foreman registered the work done by other brigades in the naryad [labor form] of his protégés, and thus created his own Stakhanovites [extremely efficient workers, named after the model Soviet worker Alexei Stakhanov].
7. The NKVD authorities’ attitude towards Poles (interrogation methods, torture, punishments, Communist propaganda, information about Poland, etc.):
The NKVD authorities’ attitude was characterized by blind hatred. Their method of treatment during every interrogation was to deride everything: the government, the “bourgeois” system in Poland, the oppression of the working class in Poland, etc. Our workers often mocked these accusations of communist propaganda on various occasions, and they exposed themselves to temporary repressive measures: worse work, restrictions on food rations. False historic facts were given.
8. Medical aid, hospitals, mortality (list the names of the dead):
Medical aid was provided, but the people who provided it were completely unprepared professionally. Several Polish citizens in the Bodaybo region died as a result of unprofessional medical aid. The delegate of the Polish embassy in Bodaybo has their names.
9. How did the contact with one’s country and family look, if there was any?
Contact with the country was hampered. I wrote hundreds of letters, most of which didn’t reach their addressees.
10. When were you released and how did you join the army?
I was released on 10 September 1941, and I immediately went to the district town of Bodaybo, making efforts in the voykom [military commissariat] to be sent to the Polish army that was being created. At the same time, I was leading a group of 120 people, Polish citizens subject to military service.
The voyenkom refused to send us away, their excuse being that there were no precise ordinances on that matter from the oblastnyi voykom.
We sent a wire to the oblastnyi voyenkomat and we waited impatiently for the answer. Every day, we came to inquire at the Bodaybo voykom, and received the laconic response: nyet otvyeta [no answer]. It was obvious that they were mocking us. Meanwhile, navigation on the Vitim and Lena rivers ceased, and we lost the chance to leave until June of the next year (winter there lasts from September to May). We had to survive in the meantime – Siberian winter was coming. We split into groups and went to work in goldmines in the Bodaybo district. Not giving up the effort to join the army, I sent a letter to the army staff in Buzuluk. On 11 February, 1942, I was summoned by wire to appear at the temporary quarters of the 7th Infantry Division. From 12 February to 29 March, I fought fiercely and tirelessly to be sent to the army. Initially, the voykom didn’t want to issue documents to me, and it was only as a result of another wire from the Polish army staff, with the signature of the Chief of Staff General Bohusz-Szyszko, that I was given documents and let go, but at my own expense. On 29 March 1942, I left by plane for Irkutsk; the flight was paid for by the branch office of the Polish embassy (1268 rubles). From Irkutsk, I already had a valid military ticket from the Soviet authorities.
19 February 1943