Gunner Tadeusz Gorzkowicz, born in Borysław on 11 June 1918, son of an oil worker.
On 25 April 1941, I was drafted into the Soviet army and I served in Voronezh in a tank division. When the Soviet-German war broke out, all Poles were taken away separately, and some of them were taken to the front. Those who were left were taken to Oryol. As soon as the Germans started the bombing, we were loaded onto railcars and taken to Sverdlovsk, and from there to Prosnica [?]. We built [illegible] and there we understood what the USSR really was. We had already had enough because when we worked, they didn’t even give us anything to eat – they ate for themselves what we collected in the fields, so our hard work was in vain. About ten percent of us died of dysentery and typhoid. Later on we left Prosnica and went to Tagil. It was even worse there, because if I wanted to buy some bread I had to stand in a queue for 24 hours and I still didn’t buy any. People also died of hunger. When a friend of mine died and I wanted to bury him, they didn’t even give me a coffin. I was at the cemetery and wanted the gravedigger to dig a grave, but he gave us shovels and said we had to dig it by ourselves. When we went there, we saw corpses lying under snow and being mangled by dogs.
Later on, when I was operating trolleys, I saw our people working at gunpoint. If they were too weak or sick to do the work, the NKVD beat them to death.
I managed to join the Polish army. Praise be to those who formed the army and made it possible.