Corporal Józef Szczepan, 35 years old, reservist, caretaker of the garrison shooting range in Brody, married. I’m Polish.
On 5 March 1941, I was arrested in Lwów in a raid at Szumlańskich Street, from where I was escorted to the militia station at Kordeckiego Street 24. A superficial investigation was carried out and I was accused of an offense under paragraph 81, that is, crossing the oblast border. I was thrown into a basement, where I stayed two days without food or even a drop of water. After two days, I was transferred by prison truck to the militia station at Jachowicza Street, where I spent three days. After my photograph was taken and my detailed personal data was written down – and I would like to point out that I was beaten, tortured and locked up – I was taken to prison, the so-called Brygidki. As soon as I arrived there, they made me turn my face to the wall so that I would not see what was happening around me. After some time, I was taken to a cell, where I saw 86 naked people – it was very hot and terribly stuffy inside. I stayed in that cell until 22 May 1941. That day, I was tried and sentenced to two years of hard labor.
When they escorted me back from the trial, I was placed in a cell for those who had been tried, where I stayed until 10 June. That day, I was transferred by train, along with other prisoners, to the labor camp in Uman, Ukraine. There were only 35 of us on the train and we were given 400 grams of bread and a herring per day, and a bucket of water for two days. When I arrived at the camp, as soon as we were escorted to the yard, we had to set up large tents, which could accommodate 150 people. We arrived in the morning, but we were not given anything to eat until the next morning. The next day, we were taken to work, under a strong escort, to the airport in Uman, two and a half kilometers away from the camp. We, Polish people, were usually assigned to do earthworks or to break stones. The work quotas were so high that no one was able to meet them. I met only 25 percent of the quota, and for meeting the full quota we were given 400 grams of bread.
I spent 40 days there, until the Germans rebelled against Russia. We marched off from Uman on foot to the railroad station in Nova Ukrainka. In Nova Ukrainka, we walked almost without food because it had not been delivered for the prisoners. Eventually, we all started to unanimously demand: “We want water!” The NKVD fired a salvo, another one, and a third one. Two Poles were killed as a result of the shooting. They were stripped off their clothes and dragged into roadside bushes.
In Nova Ukrainka, they loaded us onto a train, in cars for transporting coal, 120 people in each. We traveled like that for seven days to the port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. The camp in Mariupol was messy; there was no hygiene or medical assistance. If a prisoner was sick, their sickness was rarely acknowledged. The meals were miserable, the work in factories was hard, the work quotas were impossible to meet. One day in August, a colleague of mine, Bolesław Bodnar from Lwów, told me that he could not stand it anymore and he would run away. And he escaped, but in three days he was caught and locked in a punishment cell for five days. After that, he was released.
On 29 August, we were released due to the amnesty, and Bolesław Bodnar was taken somewhere a few days before the release, but no one knows where to. At the train station on the day of the release, we were packed into two freight cars, which could accommodate 160 people each, and we were sent, without a convoy, to Tomsk in Siberia. We were told that General Sikorski was waiting for us there. In Tomsk, we were sent to a kolkhoz, where I worked as a free laborer for a month. Then, a telegram from Tashkent arrived. It said that all Polish people should join the Polish army. In the kolkhoz, we were paid 60 rubles and we were escorted to Tomsk, where instead of being sent to the army, we were sent to a forest to fell trees. We worked there for less than a month. I earned 328 rubles, but I was not paid because I wanted to join the Polish Army. One day, at the end of November, I spoke to my fellow prisoners, Engineer Teofil Pestkowski from Dubno and Jan Pędel from Krasne-Busk, and I told them that we had to escape because otherwise we would never get through to the south, to Tashkent. On 29 November, we got on a train without tickets and we went to Novosibirsk as stowaways. From there, we joined a transport of our people and with them we reached the Kareza station in Uzbekistan. There, we were unloaded and sent again to an Uzbekistan kolkhoz, where we were treated worse than dogs. If he met the work quota, we were given 300 grams of wheat with mud, with thick pieces of straw, so we had to pick out the straw, clean the wheat and grind it on a stone, but then no more than 120–150 grams were left. This is what a free man had to experience in Soviet Russia. One day at the beginning of February 1942, I set out to Guzar on foot. I arrived at the assembly point on 6 February, and on 9 [February] I joined the Polish Army.
Throughout the time I spent in prison and camps, I never heard from my family.
The voting took place under the supervision of the NKVD. If a Pole did not want to vote, the NKVD escorted him and forced him to vote, and afterwards he was taken to prison.