Corporal Antoni Jerszow, 28 years old, married.
I was taken prisoner on 23 September 1939, in Werba near Włodzimierz. After disarming us, they led us to Włodzimierz station, loaded us onto wagons, and took us to Kowel. I escaped from there and decided to go home, but that didn’t work, because Ukrainians captured me in the forest, several kilometers from Kowel, and brought me back to the city. From Kowel they took me to Shepetivka. I stayed there for more than a dozen days, and it was only there that I learned what it meant to be a prisoner. There were a dozen or so thousand of us, and we were all hungry and emaciated. In the middle of October, they gathered around a thousand of us and told us to line up quickly because we were supposed to march out soon. They gave us a piece of bread each and we set off, marching through the middle of the road and surrounded by boytsy with machine guns. They were hustling us as if we were the worst kind of criminals. At first, I couldn’t understand where they were leading us. It wasn’t until after some time when I realized they were escorting us towards Poland. When we entered our homeland, I felt different, even though I was hungry and exhausted. We walked for two days and one night and reached Hoszcza, where Polish barracks were located. They assigned such great numbers of us to each room that every inch of space was taken.
After two days of rest, hard and miserable days began. We went to work every day. If one didn’t, they wouldn’t get food and would be put in the dungeon. The quotas were so high that it was hard to even listen to these numbers, not to mention doing them. 14 cubic meters of soft soil were to be dug up, and 1.5 meters of rock had to be crushed for rubble. When the rocks were loaded onto cars, a norm per person was 21 cubic meters. Obviously, nobody was able to fill the demanded quotas, therefore giving an excuse for them to harass us. They starved us: they gave us 400 grams of bread a day and half a liter of soup three times a day, with only a couple of grains of groats inside. Our workday was 12 hours, they didn’t care about the freezing cold and bad weather. They would just tell us that if we did our best, we would go home on 15 December.
After 15 December, they put up two fences around us, placed watchmen and searchlights, and when we reminded them they were supposed to let us go, they answered that we would never go back home, that we had to work for them, because they had a lot to do.
They carried out frequent shakedowns, and they took everything from us: we truly owned only what we were wearing on our bodies, and if anybody had more underwear or other belongings – they would put their hands on everything, even prayer books. There was no hygiene at all, lots of bugs and no underwear to change, but everybody did what they could. We worked 16 hours a day in the summer season.
I went from Hoszcza to Równe on 10 January 1941. I spent 12 days there. On 23 January, I set off to Zborów, where I stayed until 15 April, and then I went to Brody.
I was in Brody until 22 June. When the German-Russian war broke out, they drove us back into Russia. It was a rough and bloody journey, as hundreds of our brothers fell dead. Whenever someone was too weak to walk, he would be pierced with a bayonet or shot. That is how Polish blood was shed on the Bolshevik grounds on the way to Zlotonosha. There, we were put into wagons and taken to Starobilsk. By the end of August, my experience as a prisoner ended there, as I joined the Polish army.