Anatol Snobiej, gunner, born in 1917 in the Kasuta village, Wilejka District.
In September 1940, the Soviet authorities announced that – all throughout the occupied Polish territory – men born in 1917, 1918 and 1919 shall be drafted into the Red Army. At that point, a year after the “liberation” of Eastern Poland since which the Soviets had been conducting an operation of strict population registration via the issuance of passports. Now, once they had issued the documents, they were calling on their new “citizens” to fulfill their duty towards the new “motherland” and enter military service. I was called to appear before an army draft board in Kurzeniec.
Just three days after the appointment I was already on my way to the regiment. I was part of a transport of around 2,000 people, of whom approximately 60% were Polish. Such transports were then being sent in all directions throughout the giant territory of the USSR, carrying thousands of Poles who were soon to become soldiers of the Red Army.
On 20 September 1940, I arrived at the 21st Mountain Cavalry Regiment in Kurgan-Tyube near the Afghan border. After a couple of days spent in quarantine, I started the normal basic training. Besides the standard combat training for a Red Army recruit we also had obligatory “political education” sessions and special attention was paid to whether one made progress in that area as expected. And so, a soldier would spend eight hours a week listening to talks extolling the USSR as the most democratic nation on Earth that has the best foreign policy and seeks not to conquer foreign lands but liberate other nations from oppression, “lending them brotherly support” and such.
In December 1940, an order arrived: all Poles were to be relocated from border areas to territories deep within Central Asia, due to fears that – if left in the border regions – they could desert. In accordance with this order, I was sent to Fergana along with the other Poles from my unit. We served there until the outbreak of the Soviet-German war.
In the first few days after its outbreak, Stalin issued a secret order to form battalions to do “military construction” work, i.e., build barracks, factories, depots and such. These units were to be staffed with all those Red Army soldiers who did not take to their political education with sufficient enthusiasm and were, therefore, seen as suspect and potentially disloyal. This applied specially to Poles and Germans. Thus, on 25 July 1941, all soldiers meeting these criteria were disarmed and then sent to Samarkand, where such units were being formed. Upon my arrival in Samarkand, I immediately saw a good couple thousand of these special Red Army soldiers. They were men of varied nationality: Poles accounted for approximately 50%, the next 30% were Germans (mostly from the Volga River area), and then came the minorities, including Soviet-born Poles (i.e. ethnically Polish people born and raised in the USSR) as well as various Soviet citizens with questionable pasts.
Once the construction battalions were properly formed up, each unit was sent to its designated project. A construction battalion usually consisted of 500 to 1,000 men. I was assigned to the 770th Battalion that was sent to Kyzyl-Arvat, which is in the desert near Ashgabat.
The discipline in this unit was upheld very strictly – we were absolutely prohibited from leaving the area we were stationed in, although one must also add that there wasn’t really anywhere to go. But if anyone did leave the perimeter without explicit permission, they would be court-martialed and the court would deliver a sentence as per the criteria used in the Red Army during wartime for the crime of samovolnaya otluchka [unauthorized absence], that is three to seven years of prison.
Other people worked alongside our battalion – specifically, camp inmates, members of a punishment battalion and people sentenced to forced labor that came from central Ukraine and Russia. We were assigned the same work quotas, given the same pay (we constantly owed money), lived in the same tattered tents. The only difference was that we weren’t being guarded by soldiers with rifles.
I spent the next two months – that is January and February 1942 – working at the town of Mary. This was worst assignment I had ever been on. The camp was located 9 kilometers away from the town and there was no kitchen, so dinner would always be brought from town. They brought it in barrels that had previously been used to store herrings. The food was always cold and mostly meatless, with the occasional bit of horse meat. Incidentally, the local workers had long since been eating [illegible] meat. We normally worked for 12 hours a day and those who didn’t meet the quota went as long as 14 or 15 hours. There were also additional nighttime assignments of unloading bricks. We didn’t get any leave (in the whole 12 months I worked in that battalion I got just one day off). The disciplinary measures were drastic: being late for work could be immediately punished with a sentence of a few years in prison. And you couldn’t breathe a word about that either, on account of the provocateurs inserted among us. For example, one Kozłowski – a Pole from Nieśwież – was sentenced to death for counterrevolutionary activity because he told a sarcastic joke about the causes of the Soviet-Finnish [Winter] War while waiting in line to get his soup; it was a show trial.
My last assignment was in the town of Frunze. While on my way there, I met a Polish major at the Kogon station. He told me that a few Polish divisions had already been formed in Russia and that a large army was being assembled in the Fergana Valley. He assured me that we would all be released so as to join the Polish Army.
There was a branch office of ours in Frunze but contacting it was quite a problem since we weren’t issued any leave to go to town – our clothes and shoes were so full of lice that it would’ve been an embarrassment to let us go there. I did, however, manage to meet a trusted representative of the Polish authorities in March 1942 and informed him that around 200 Poles were still in the Frunze area as members of a construction battalion. He asked me to bring him a list of their names, which I compiled and delivered at the next opportunity. He promised that everything would be alright and that we would be released shortly but March passed, as did April, and nothing changed. We made various attempts to notify the local Polish delegate but to no avail.
1 May 1942 brought a monumental change: the military construction battalions were dissolved – we could leave and go get work in town. We all went and officially registered at the Polish branch office, receiving registration certificates. In the meantime, the Soviet voyenkomat took stock of all the former battalion soldiers under its authority and issued them voyenbilety [military identity cards] with the annotations: voyennoobyazan [obliged to military service] and mobilizovan na rabotu [mobilized for labor]. I didn’t accept this sort of card, but the NKVD did manage to take away my Polish registration certificate – they took them away from everyone.
On 3 July 1942, I ran away from the proizvodstvo [manufacturing facility] and joined the Polish Army. Several of my fellow soldiers – a dozen or so – escaped as well. As for the rest, I’m sure they’re still working in Frunze, the capital of sunny Kirghizia.
Encampment, 25 February 1943