Personal data (name and surname, rank, age, occupation and marital status):
Tadeusz Gedymin Malinowski, gunner, aged 23, student of the Faculty of Medicine, unmarried.
Date and circumstances of arrest:
14 June 1941, Wilno. When I saw my family in the NKVD car, I decided to go with them.
Name of the camp (prison – forced labor location):
Altai Krai, central camp point of Troitskoye mechanized logging point.
Description of the camp, prison, etc. (grounds, buildings, housing conditions, hygiene):
Wooden barrack, bad roof cover, innumerable bedbugs, enough water.
Composition of prisoners of war, inmates, exiles (nationality, category of crimes, intellectual and moral standing, mutual relations, etc.):
Poles: spetspereselentsy [displaced persons], one Lithuanian family, six Russian families. Intellectual standing – varied. Four [?] military families, three families of clerks, two old, retired, single officers, two farmer families, two families of factory workers (Jews), four middle-class families, one doctor and one teacher.
Life in the camp, prison, etc. (daily routine, working conditions, standards, remuneration, food, clothing, relations between inmates, cultural life, etc.):
Correct mutual relations, some people religious, high nervousness, little solidarity, faith for a better tomorrow. Women’s tasks: a) cutting and chopping firewood (pine – cut lower parts of trunks to be used as a building material), quota: 3 m3, earnings: one ruble 30 kopecks for 1 m3; b) work on the road, digging and carrying the soil, daily earnings of 4 to 6 rubles. Men’s tasks: wood chopping as above, tree felling, quota per person: 7.5 m3 of trees to be felled, sown, tree branches to be cut, bark to be removed, earnings: 1.5 rubles for 1 m3.
Attitude of the NKVD authorities towards Poles: (interrogation method, tortures, punishments, communist propaganda, information about Poland, etc.):
Since it was after the war outbreak, the authorities were quite confused and gave in to our attitude. A fraudulent appropriation of funds by one of the heads caused that for one and a half month we received 3 rubles as an advance payment per two weeks. Single cases of arrest. The anti-communist propaganda secretly improvised by Poles was successful.
Medical assistance, hospitals, mortality rate (provide the names of the deceased):
There were doctors, but no medical assistance. In the Akyrtobe hospital, those who suffered from typhus lay two in one bed, so that the legs of one of them lay next to the head of the other. In the kolkhoz in Kazakhstan, 18 people of various age died out of 180 Polish citizens within 3 months.
Was there any possibility of getting in contact with one’s country and family?
There was no communication.
When were you released and how did you get through to the Polish Army?
On 19 February 1942, I left the kolkhoz in Akyrtobe for the 10th Infantry Regiment in Lugovoy, after my family had survived winter.