Gunner Zdzisław Chudzikiewicz, 21 years old, born on 3 March 1922 in Lublin, displaced; 3rd Light Artillery Regiment, 1st Squadron, 1st Battery.
I was arrested towards the end of October 1939 together with many friends from the Secondary School of the Polish Educational Society in Baranowicze. The reason for our arrest was that an unknown person had torn down the portrait of Stalin in one of the classrooms. We were taken to the prison in Baranowicze, where we were interrogated one by one. During the interrogation I was beaten with rifle butts about my back, head etc., as they wanted me to confess that I belonged to some youth organization. I was interrogated like this for six days and nights, and I was most often summoned for interrogation at night.
After three months, on 10 February, I was escorted to the train station, where I met with my family; they, in turn, had been accused of arms possession, although repeated searches proved nothing. No court sentence was imposed on me.
We (25 people in total) were loaded into a wagon. After ten days and nights on the train, we arrived in Gorky Oblast. I would like to add that my family had been given 15 minutes to get ready for the journey and they could take no more than 50 kilograms of luggage per person.
On the way we received 60 decagrams of bread per person per day, and once a day we got a liter of hot water. The temperature in the cargo wagon was well below zero, and as a result many people fell ill and suffered from frostbite. When we reached the Neya station in Gorky Oblast, we were sent to the town of Poldnevica, situated 45 kilometers from the Neya station. The most severely ill women were transported on sleigh, and the rest walked, even though the temperature was minus 40 degrees. On the way, two children froze to death; one was a year and a half, and the other two years old.
In Poldnevica, we were quartered in dilapidated houses, in which the temperature was always below zero. My entire family – my 49-year-old father, 48-year-old mother, 22-year-old brother, and myself, then 18 years old – with the exception of my 8-year-old brother, were forced to work at felling trees in the forest. Work began at 6.00 a.m., from noon to 2.00 p.m. we had a dinner break, and from 2.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. we again had to work. We had to walk seven kilometers to our site of work. We had to toil when the temperatures dropped to 48 degrees below zero. The quota was 6 cubic meters, but nobody was able to meet it; women couldn’t do more than 30 percent. Remuneration for meeting the quota was to be 140 rubles per month, but we received no more than 70 rubles. We had to buy food, and if we hadn’t sold the things that we had brought from Poland, we wouldn’t have scraped a living. I recall that at the time, 45-year-old Paszkowski from nowogródzkie voivodeship died from hunger. In Poldnevica, there were 2,000 exiles from Poland; before I left, 570 people had died during the typhus epidemic.
We were constantly harassed, and the NKVD men said that we would never return to Poland but would drop off in exile, and for the slightest offence – or indeed for no reason whatsoever – we were punched in the face.
Medical assistance at the camp was provided by an 18-year-old female paramedic. When you were sick, they didn’t exempt you from work, and for skipping work due to illness you were punished with incarceration in a punishment cell. It was a room without any floor, very cold, where you stood ankle-deep in water.
After the conclusion of the Polish-Russian agreement, we were sent to a kolkhoz in Kizil, here in Kazakhstan. In the kolkhoz we were forced to do farm work for eight hours a day, and our food consisted of 40 decagrams of wheat. There were 22 Poles in that kolkhoz, of whom six died from exhaustion. On 26 March 1942 I joined the Polish Army.