Sergeant Franciszek Teofil Powiecki, born on 21 February 1900 in Gliwice, Upper Silesia, ranger with the State Forests in the Siedlce district, married.
On 19 October 1939 I was arrested by the Soviet authorities and incarcerated in Kobryń, poleskie voivodeship, on charges of being an officer and an informer and of complicity in burning down the bridge over the Białojezierski canal in the vicinity of Radostów. They threatened me with a gun to force confessions and I was showered with abuse. After these brutal threats failed, they released me from the Kobryń prison; this was a month later. I went to my parents, who lived in the military settlement of Szpitale in the Kobryń district, and my wife and child also went there.
On the memorable night of 10 February 1940, at 2.00 a.m., the settlement was surrounded by armed soldiers and militiamen under the command of a lieutenant. They knocked on our window and told us to open the door. When the armed men entered the flat, we were all ordered to get up, and we were forbidden to move under pain of being shot. The armed men carried out a search and took all sharp objects; they laughed at the paintings and damaged some books, burning them or tearing out pages. They stole all documents and Polish money from us. Then we were ordered to get dressed. There were 17 of us, all family. Taking no heed of the infants, they told us to pack our belongings. They told us, “We won’t take you far, but to another settlement, as you cannot stay here”. We were transported under armed escort to the train station in Żabinka, where we were loaded into cargo wagons, 60 people to one. 43 people from the families of military settlers were taken that day from the settlement of Szpitale. When they had formed a unit from the local families of settlers and foresters, on 13 February the train went east. On the way, we received hot food three times.
On 28 February we arrived at the station of Helmogorka near Arkhangelsk, where we were vygruzheno [unloaded] and transported by sleigh to the township of Wodopad, situated 16 kilometers from the station. 134 families were quartered in that hamlet, and other families from the transport were sent 200 kilometers further. We were placed in barracks which had been erected by Ukrainians who had been deported there before us, and of whom only a handful survived, while the rest made up a big cemetery. We were forbidden to meet and talk with them. After two days of rest after the journey, a meeting of all adult men and women was convened, and we were divided into work brigades and sent for labor in the forest. We worked at felling trees, transporting them to depots and loading them onto tractor sleighs. The work quota for logging was set at six cubic meters. Despite harsh conditions, temperatures falling to minus 57 degrees and poor food, we were driven to the forest to perform hard labor.
We earned three – four rubles per day, and we had to make a living for ourselves and our families with that. To survive, one person needed four rubles per day. In the first months of our stay in the North, fish heads were cooked with some kasha and sold in the canteen, so the majority of us soon grew weak and began to die. We scoured the forest for blueberries, bilberries and cranberries to eat something more.
In summer we worked with chainsaws and at loading timber onto wagons, and also performed other seasonal work in the township of Termitovo. The area was swampy and trackless, and symptoms of various diseases soon appeared, but since the medical assistance was poor, we collected medicinal herbs to cater to our needs.
Meetings were held very often, and they were devoted to work quotas, who met them and who didn’t. “You are not efficient at your work, you do not help to make the Soviet Union greater. Do your best to forget Poland, as you will never see it again. You were brought here and here is where you must work, and you cannot leave your hamlet after work”.
We worked under control of the commandant of the hamlet and the head of the lesopunkt [forest work unit] and on pain of punishment – for evading work or being 10 minutes late you were punished with a deduction of 25 percent of your wages for four months, and repeat offenders were sent to Gulag camps.
The authorities were hostile towards Poles, and they offered us no comfort. Better workers could buy clothes when the foreman of the forest gave them permission to do so, so the sturdiest ones were the first to buy them. Due to poor earnings, we exchanged clothes and other items for food or money with the local populace, and sometimes even with the Soviet officials.
We didn’t have good news from the country, so the weaker ones soon grew despondent; my heart ached for those people suffering the blows of fate and despair, and although it was beyond our power to offer them financial aid, we could provide them with moral comfort. I had news from and about the country from my brother, who lived in Lwów under an assumed name and carried out clandestine activities.
Through trusted persons, we provided people with spiritual nourishment to give them the endurance to wait for better times, which would bring us freedom and take us to our homeland.
A month before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, they had begun to read our correspondence. I received a warning from the commandant of the hamlet and I didn’t get any more messages from my brother. When the war broke out, they kept all men and girls isolated from the local populace and from our families. They stressed the importance of work efficiency all the time. After the end of the workday, everybody had to spend two hours doing various corvées.
They were afraid to mention the Polish-Soviet agreement, as they feared that we would abandon work and go home.
A month later the agreement was read out to us, and some were issued an udostoverenie [certificate of release]; we were released from work and ordered to enter into new agreements with the lesopunkt. Food was getting more scarce and more and more people died, so we tried to avoid death from hunger by collecting mushrooms and berries and exchanging what we had left of our belongings for food with the locals, while those who had nothing to exchange picked up and ate potato peelings.
When the frosts came we were so weak that nobody dared to go any further, afraid of freezing to death. They made difficulties when we wanted to get in touch with our delegation in Arkhangelsk. They tried to talk us into staying and not going south.
I received my udostoverenie on 21 December 1941, and immediately thereafter I set off to the south with my wife and child.
The following died in the north: my parents Teofil Powiecki and Albina Powiecka, my older brother’s son, Witold Powiecki, and Bolesław Powiecki.
From Szpitale settlement, the following perished: Ignacy Glenc, Anna Glenc, Karol Glenc, Edward Tomala and his wife, two sons of Jan Tomala and two sons of Paweł Hawat. A lot of our people perished there, and I find it difficult to give all the names.
I can confirm that they died of exhaustion caused by starvation and inhuman forced labor in freezing temperatures and on poor food. The head of the lesopunkt, Muraszon, used sophisticated methods of torture, and he had no human feelings.