Rifleman Józef Sztar, farmer; nationality – Polish; Roman Catholic; education – four grades of elementary school.
I was deported with my family to the USSR. My entire family and I were deported on 22 December 1940 to Arkhangelsk, the village of Warda. I worked in uspinda [?], where the work quota was 12 stretchers [?] weighing one and a half tons. We were paid 12 rubles per ton, but the quota was very difficult to meet. We were given 500 grams of bread and we were paid every 12 days. This was forced labor. The living conditions were very difficult – we had to buy clothes with our own money. During the year I spent there, 105 Polish people died. On holidays, we were forced to go to work and if someone was ten minutes late, they were locked in cells. The authorities were hostile towards Poles and claimed that none of us would return to our homeland.
Five people died from my family: my mother Władysława, three brothers, and my sister. I left the Bolshevik kolkhoz after the Polish-Soviet agreement was signed. They didn’t want to let me go, but I left the kolkhoz on 15 October 1941. From Siberia, I went to a town in Uzbekistan. The work I did there was supervised by the government; the work quota was to weed over an acre of land, which was very difficult to meet. We were paid 400 grams of wheat grains. The conditions: the apartments were very cold and had no stove; we received no firewood or salt, just one lepyoshka weighing 150 grams. We were given no kerosene. I spent five months there. I left the kolkhoz on 15 March 1942 and went to the camps of the Polish army, to the town of Karas.
13 February 1943