Deportation

The deport­a­tion of set­tlers and for­est­ers took place on 10 Feb­ru­ary 1940. The people of Wołkow­ysk knew noth­ing of the Soviet author­it­ies' pre­par­a­tions to deport Polish cit­izens. It was kept secret so that those on the list would have no time to escape. Early in the morn­ing of 10 Feb­ru­ary 1940, while we were still in bed, four rep­res­ent­at­ives of the author­it­ies appeared at our home: a uni­formed NKVD officer (of the People's Com­mis­sariat for Internal Affairs) armed with a pistol, a civil­ian, and two Red Army sol­diers with rifles and fixed bay­on­ets. Father let them in and then heard:

– Sobiraytes' s veshchami v dva chasa! (Pack your things within two hours!)

– A kuda my paye­dem? (Where are we going?) Father asked the NKVD man, but received no clear answer.

We were allowed to take food sup­plies, clothes, bed­ding and other per­sonal belong­ings. Two sledges stood in the street in front of the house, onto which we were to load ourselves. My par­ents began pack­ing, and we man­aged to take quite a lot, includ­ing a treadle sewing machine. We had time to eat break­fast, and our “guests” had a bite too. In fact we exceeded the two-hour time limit for pack­ing, but pack­ing was not easy, because we did not have enough suit­cases and had to make bundles. My brother and I wanted to go to the privy out­side. Father had to clear this with the offi­cial, and when we went out two Red Army sol­diers with rifles went with us. Evid­ently they feared we would run away, although that was unlikely, since the frost out­side must have been around minus 25 degrees. The tem­per­at­ure could not be read, because the window panes were covered with a thick layer of ice and hoar­frost. Feb­ru­ary 1940 was one of the harshest win­ters, and the frosts were hard to bear; even school had been sus­pen­ded for a long time.

We left behind all the fur­niture of three rooms and a kit­chen, as well as vari­ous appli­ances and kit­chen utensils and more valu­able items such as a bicycle, a double-bar­relled shot­gun, a Brown­ing (revolver), a radio set, and the rich col­lec­tion of books in Father's lib­rary, includ­ing some leather-bound volumes. On the wall of Father's study there remained a fine stuffed caper­cail­lie, a trophy from some hunt. We left little cloth­ing behind, apart from a round box con­tain­ing Mother's five hats, which stayed in the ward­robe. Nor were we able to take all the food. Accord­ing to the detailed notes Father made from memory once we were in exile, we left at home: 700 kg of pota­toes, 300 kg of rye flour, 80 kg of sauerkraut, 35 kg of beet­root, 25 kg of car­rots, 10 kg of onions, 20 jars of pre­served veget­ables, 5 litres of honey and 4 litres of wine. The wine was home-made from bil­ber­ries, and while we were pack­ing Father let every­one present help them­selves. Even I, an eleven-year-old boy, was allowed a few sips, but it did not agree with me (per­haps there were more than a few sips) and I was soon “giving back” what I had drunk. Since Father ran an office at home in con­nec­tion with his work as for­ester and also held offi­cial cash, he drew up a proper report, which he handed to the NKVD officer together with the sum of 1,612 roubles, and obtained a receipt from him.

What we left of our house­hold was the family's life's work, and it was con­fis­cated by the invaders from the east. The food we left was also very valu­able at a time when the shops had been empty since the Rus­si­ans arrived and long queues for salt, sugar and other goods had appeared in the town. The deport­a­tions went hand in hand with organ­ised plun­der of the deportees' prop­erty, which fell into the hands of indi­vidu­als who grew rich amid the pre­vail­ing law­less­ness. What became of the things we left at home is not known. Mr Ciepłowski, our neigh­bour on Wileńska Street, with whom Father cor­res­pon­ded while we were near the White Sea, could tell us noth­ing def­in­ite about it.

Before the war Father kept his sav­ings mainly in PKO sav­ings books. The offi­cial car­ry­ing out our deport­a­tion did not allow Father to take any doc­u­ments, so five PKO sav­ings books totalling 11,500 złoty remained in his desk, together with shares, cheques and bills of exchange worth 2,500 złoty (alto­gether the equi­val­ent of four years' salary for a for­ester). The post-war author­it­ies never returned sav­ings depos­ited with the Post Office Sav­ings Bank, so as a result of the war Father's whole life's sav­ings were lost, with the excep­tion of a build­ing plot bought in 1936 in Skarżysko-Kami­enna, which came through the tur­moil of war unscathed.

The pack­ing was fin­ished and Father began car­ry­ing the larger bundles out to the sledges wait­ing in front of the house, while Mother and I car­ried the smal­ler things. The sledges set off at noon towards the town and then towards the Cent­ral Sta­tion, about three kilo­metres from our Wileńska Street. At the sta­tion we saw a goods train made up of a great many wagons. The train was sur­roun­ded by sol­diers, and people with their lug­gage were being loaded into the wagons. These were Polish rail­way wagons fitted with two-tier plank bunks so that more people could sleep in them. We were loaded into one of the wagons, where there were already some people. In the middle of the wagon there was an iron stove, and at the side a hole had been cut in the floor, boxed in with wood, which was to serve as a toilet. The wagon had large slid­ing doors that were shut and bolted from the out­side by the guards; they could not be opened from within. Through the small rect­an­gu­lar vent­il­a­tion win­dows near the roof one could look down from the upper bunk and see a strip of ground just a few metres from the wagon. About 30 people were loaded into the wagon. The toilet turned out to be a great prob­lem, because once people began using it, in 25 degrees of frost everything froze solid. But the resource­ful occu­pants of our wagon tried to clear it by heat­ing a long iron rod in the stove, and with this rod they man­aged to unblock this import­ant san­it­ary facil­ity a little.

For two days the train still stood in the sta­tion, and during that time more people brought in from the Wołkow­ysk dis­trict were prob­ably being loaded. Only on 12 Feb­ru­ary did the train move off, and nobody in our wagon had any idea where we were going. The next day we reached Baranow­icze, a town about 120 km east of Wołkow­ysk. At Baranow­icze our jour­ney in a Polish goods wagon ended, and we were to con­tinue in a Soviet goods train on the broad-gauge track, which had already been exten­ded to Baranow­icze from the former border with the Soviet Union. In our wagon there was an eld­erly lady of about sev­enty, for whom a rel­at­ive came to Baranow­icze, having obtained per­mis­sion to with­draw her from the deport­a­tion, but she refused, pre­fer­ring to stay with her closest family, with whom she had been taken from home. Soon after arriv­ing at the place of exile the old lady died.

The stop in Baranow­icze lasted five whole days, and only on 18 Feb­ru­ary did we trans­fer to a Soviet esh­elon (trans­port train), better equipped for car­ry­ing people, and the train set off east­wards. The advant­age of these Soviet goods wagons was that they had two small glazed win­dows that could be slid open to look out, and which lit the inside of the wagon. The middle of the wagon, the width of the slid­ing doors, was a common space with an iron stove. Only those on the upper bunks could look out of the win­dows; those on the lower bunks had to sit in semi-dark­ness, but they were warmer, because the iron stove stood on the floor and heated them more. We ended up on an upper bunk with a window, which gave us better con­tact with the out­side world. The stove had a single ring, so only one pot could be put on it at a time, and the fam­il­ies took turns. There was a con­stant crush around the stove, since soup or por­ridge had to be cooked for 30 people, as well as water for tea. My brother Zbyszek had the bright idea of using the stove out of turn: he mixed a thin batter, stuck it to the outer casing of the hot stove, and so baked very good flat­breads out­side the offi­cial rota.

Accord­ing to offi­cial fig­ures, there were 1,818 people in our trans­port from Wołkow­ysk¹. Assum­ing the norm was 30 people per wagon, one can estim­ate that the train, includ­ing the guards' wagons, con­sisted of about 65 wagons. We were escor­ted by sol­diers of the NKVD Convoy Troops. The wagons were locked from the out­side by the guards, and when the train stopped they were opened one by one so that people could relieve them­selves. Then came the com­mand: “Davay pod vagon!” mean­ing that one should get out of the wagon and do one's busi­ness out­side. Trans­lated lit­er­ally, “pod vagon” meant under the wagon, but that could have been risky if the train sud­denly moved off, and in any case there was too little room under a wagon for a crouch­ing adult. In prac­tice everything took place beside the wagon. During the jour­ney we received a bread ration from time to time at the larger sta­tions, and then the guard would shout: “Davay dva chel­oveka za khle­bom!” (send two people for bread!). Another fre­quent com­mand was: “Davay dva chel­oveka za vodoy!” (send two people for water!). Besides bread and water, we also received hot soup a few times during the jour­ney.

We trav­elled east, stop­ping for some­what longer at Minsk, Orsha, Smolensk, Vyazma and Mozhaysk, and reached Moscow. In Moscow came the com­mand “Davay pod vagon!”, but the train had stopped some­where far from the centre, and when we got out of the wagon we saw almost noth­ing of the cap­ital of the mighty empire. In Moscow we turned north and trav­elled via Yaroslavl and Volo­gda towards Arkhangelsk. We stopped at Obozer­sky sta­tion, where a branch line ran north-west. At Obozer­sky there was an esh­elon full of troops. When our Poles asked the sol­diers where they were going, they would not answer. No wonder: they were bound by mil­it­ary secrecy. These were cer­tainly troop move­ments con­nec­ted with the Finnish front. The war between the USSR and Fin­land lasted from 30 Novem­ber 1939 to 13 March 1940, and our encounter with the mil­it­ary train took place around 27 Feb­ru­ary. I found con­firm­a­tion that troops were being car­ried along this line at that time in a report of 27 Feb­ru­ary 1940 sent to the People's Com­mis­sar for Internal Affairs, Com­rade Beria. The report read: “Trans­port no. 4082 was halted en route on the morn­ing of 26.02.1940 at Yemtsa sta­tion, about 80 km from its des­tin­a­tion, because it was impossible to unload at Obozer­skaya sta­tion, which was occu­pied by mil­it­ary esh­el­ons”². From Obozer­sky our trans­port went on north-west for another 50 km or so to the ter­minus at Kodino. Here the rail­way ended, and here our jour­ney by rail ended too, though it was not the end of our jour­ney. As I recall, Kodino was a size­able set­tle­ment in the taiga, its build­ings scattered over sev­eral hun­dred metres and sur­roun­ded by snow-covered spruce forest. Kodino marked the end of the first com­pleted sec­tion of a rail­way that was to link the main Moscow–Arkhangelsk line with Belo­morsk, 400 km away, which in turn had a rail con­nec­tion to the ice-free port of Mur­mansk on the Kola Pen­in­sula. At the time we did not know that there was a large labour camp at Kodino, whose pris­on­ers, once the snow was gone, would resume build­ing the rail­way to Belo­morsk.

We stayed in the wagons at Kodino for two days. Only on the even­ing of the second day were we ordered to unload. A large number of horse-drawn sledges arrived, driven by carters, and we began climb­ing aboard in turn. Then we set off into the night in an unknown dir­ec­tion. Our izvozchik (driver) handled the sledge skil­fully, but, as I remem­ber, he had an inex­haust­ible supply of curses with which he urged the horse on. The horse was fairly intel­li­gent and under­stood the mean­ing of the tor­rents of abuse per­fectly well. After mid­night, having covered about 35 km, we reached the vil­lage where we were to spend the night. The vil­lage was called Verkhovye; we stopped there and were all quartered, family by family, in the vil­la­gers' cot­tages. These were wooden, one-room cot­tages. The living room was upstairs, reached by a stair­case, and on the ground floor there were stor­e­rooms of some kind. Our khozyayka (land­lady) was a middle-aged woman who was kind to us and offered us tea made from dried forest ber­ries. She greatly enjoyed our cherry pre­serves with her tea. She did have sugar to bite on, that is, lump sugar in hard irreg­u­lar pieces, which was not stirred into the tea but held in the mouth while drink­ing chai, or tea. Since the vil­la­gers had been obliged to billet Poles, they received as pay­ment from the author­it­ies one litre of par­affin to light the cot­tage and a small ration of sugar. It was the last days of Feb­ru­ary, winter still held fast, and the vil­lage lay under more than a metre of snow. A size­able river, the Mudy­uga, flowed through the vil­lage, bound by a thick layer of ice. Near the vil­lage a large part of the river had been cleared of snow, and holes had been cut in the ice from which people drew water. After three weeks shut up in a wagon, I slid on the ice with great pleas­ure where the snow had been cleared away.

We spent three days in Verkhovye, and on the fourth day, 4 March 1940, sledges (pod­vody) were brought, we loaded ourselves and our belong­ings, and con­tin­ued our jour­ney. The end of our jour­ney was near, since only a dozen or so kilo­metres of taiga sep­ar­ated us from our per­man­ent place of res­id­ence. We reached a forest set­tle­ment known in the offi­cial lan­guage of the NKVD as spet­s­posy­olok no. 68 (spe­cial set­tle­ment) named Szom­boziero, and we were called spet­sper­eselen­tsy, that is, spe­cial reset­tlers. The set­tle­ment lay on Lake Szom­boziero and took its name from the lake. The lake was fairly large, about a kilo­metre long and up to three hun­dred metres wide, and lay in the midst of the taiga. When we arrived it was frozen and covered with a thick layer of snow, and along its west­ern shore stood a row of a dozen or so huts, includ­ing sev­eral smal­ler ones hous­ing the canteen, the banya (bath­house), the shop and the bakery. Some­what apart there was a hut where the com­mand­ant of the spe­cial set­tle­ment lived with his two assist­ants (mili­tia­men), as well as the shop assist­ant and sev­eral other employ­ees. A sep­ar­ate build­ing served as a stable for the horses. Of our group of five hun­dred people who had come by sledge from Verkhovye, a large part unloaded at Szom­boziero, but not all, for a smal­ler group of sev­eral dozen went on another two kilo­metres to a small set­tle­ment called Shestoye Kat­ishche. The name can be trans­lated as Timber Load­ing Point No. 6, and it was con­nec­ted with earlier log­ging in the area and with timber being stored at this point ready to be hauled away. As it happened, my family was in the group sent to Sixth Kat­ishche, and our driver took us there. In our set­tle­ment, Kat­iszcze, as we came to call it for short, there were only two living huts and two smal­ler huts, one hous­ing the banya, or bath­house, and the other the canteen. Beside one of the huts stood a ramp, a wooden struc­ture which, before our arrival, had been used for load­ing logs. On arrival we unloaded our belong­ings from the sledges and took the place assigned to us in one of the rooms of hut no. 1 (the huts are numbered on the map on p. 34). Two other fam­il­ies were assigned to the same room with us. The room had one bread oven and three beds with straw mat­tresses, one bed for each family. Four­teen of us ended up in that room: my family of five; the family of Stefan Kolanowski, a for­ester from near Wołkow­ysk, also five, with his wife, two sons, fif­teen-year-old Iren­eusz and four­teen-year-old Jan, and a ten-year-old daugh­ter; and the third family, Mr Chmielewski with his wife, a daugh­ter in her twen­ties and an eight­een-year-old son. Chmielewski was a mil­it­ary set­tler and, like my Father, a former legion­ary. Living con­di­tions in such a crowd were hard, but we had grown used to the crush during twenty days shut in a wagon. The men argued heatedly about polit­ics by the stove, the most rad­ical being Chmielewski. Both of them often laughed at Bach­miński because he could not chop wood for the stove and made strange, exag­ger­ated move­ments while chop­ping. He clearly had no talent for phys­ical work. But the rule was that the men took turns tend­ing the stove, and each had to chop his share of wood.

The huts in which the Poles lived, both at Kat­iszcze and at Szom­boziero, had been built by Ukrain­i­ans depor­ted during the Soviet repres­sions against the kulaks and other “enemies of the people” in the 1930s. The Ukrain­i­ans had left the huts before we arrived, but what became of them we could not find out; they had dis­persed some­where. That does not mean these Ukrain­i­ans had been removed from the area alto­gether. Stat­ist­ics show that on 1 Octo­ber 1940 there were 40,130 so-called trud­poselen­tsy in the Arkhangelsk Oblast, that is, people for­cibly resettled for labour as part of the repres­sions against the Soviet Union's own cit­izens. There were some­what fewer of these Ukrain­ian set­tlers than there were depor­ted Polish cit­izens settled in the Arkhangelsk Oblast, whose number in 1940 was about 55,000³.

From what I saw, not all of us deportees were wealthy and well off. In our hut there lived a family with two boys a little younger than me who had no boots and wore lapti. Lapti were a kind of sandal woven from tree bark. In pre-war Poland the poorest people of Polesie wore lapti. In March 1940 there were still hard frosts at Kat­iszcze, yet my friends in their lapti did not get frost­bit­ten feet. Wealth­ier people found it easier to sur­vive here, because they had been able to bring per­sonal belong­ings when depor­ted, which could be sold here for the money needed to sur­vive. Those who were poorer and had noth­ing to sell, living only on the low earn­ings of usu­ally a single work­ing member of a large family, soon found them­selves in a crit­ical situ­ation. The wages were not enough for a family to sur­vive phys­ic­ally.

A few days after we arrived at Kat­iszcze, all the adults were mobil­ised for work. Near our hut there was an area where log­ging had begun. A large group of men was assigned to this work under a Rus­sian desy­at­nik (fore­man), a skilled lum­ber­jack. They were given saws and axes, and the Rus­sian showed them how to fell trees. I watched this work for sev­eral days and noticed that some Poles made rapid pro­gress in acquir­ing the skills of a forest worker. But the master of this work was the desy­at­nik him­self, who could fell a huge spruce single-handed in one go with a bow saw. Some of our people learnt felling, while others lopped branches, cut the felled spruces into shorter lengths, and stacked “metres”. Stack­ing metres meant that two people with a two-handed saw cut the felled tree into one-metre lengths and then piled these logs one on another to a height of one metre, form­ing stacks from one to sev­eral metres long. This wood was used for fuel, while the long lengths were taken to timber-pro­cessing plants for fur­ther work­ing, or could be used on the spot to build living huts. Our people had neither proper work clothes nor warm boots for work­ing in the open in the frost and fre­quent snow. The Rus­sian desy­at­nik, on the other hand, was dressed per­fectly: he wore an ush­anka (fur hat with ear flaps), a quilted fufayka jacket and quilted trousers, valenki (felt boots) of hard felt on his feet and warm mit­tens on his hands. Many of our people, lack­ing warm clothes and boots, got frost­bit­ten hands and feet and were then unable to go on work­ing.

All adults and young people over six­teen were obliged to do phys­ical work. The spe­cial set­tle­ment was a forced labour camp. Only the sick, or women caring for sev­eral chil­dren, could be exemp­ted from work. At Szom­boziero we had a med­ical post, where sick notes were issued by its feld­sher­itsa (med­ical assist­ant). The notes were hand­writ­ten on small scraps of paper but stamped with a round seal bear­ing the inscrip­tion: Arkhangelsk Oblast, Onega Dis­trict, Med­ical Post No. 1. A Pole who avoided work without a sick note from the med­ical post could be tried for progul (unjus­ti­fied absence). The trials were held at the Base, that is, at the work site on the Onega River, 20 km from Szom­boziero, where a larger group of our com­pat­ri­ots worked float­ing timber. It was a dis­trict court that came from the town of Onega, 35 km away, and at its vis­it­ing ses­sions it con­sidered the requests for pun­ish­ment sub­mit­ted by the set­tle­ment com­mand­ant and sen­tenced the accused under the Decree of the Presi­dium of the Supreme Soviet. One such trial was held against Jad­wiga Wróblewska, who was accused of fail­ing to report for work without proper jus­ti­fic­a­tion. But she came out of it unscathed, because the court accep­ted a cer­ti­fic­ate from the med­ical assist­ant stat­ing that Mrs Wróblewska's daugh­ter had been ill and her mother had to look after her. Under the Decree, absence from work or eva­sion of work was pun­ish­able by six months of cor­rect­ive labour at one's work­place with 25 per cent of earn­ings with­held, or by two to six months in prison.

Work dis­cip­line was enforced by com­mand­ant Popov and, after Popov was recalled, by his suc­cessor Nikolay­enko, together with two uni­formed assist­ants, Yev­seyev and Gusev, who went round the huts check­ing that every­one had gone to work. It is worth adding that they had a mater­ial interest in squeez­ing out work dis­cip­line, since the costs of the set­tle­ment com­mand­ant's office and of the Dis­trict Com­mand­ant's Office in the town of Onega were covered by a monthly deduc­tion of 10 per cent from the deportees' earn­ings. I find con­firm­a­tion of this in my Father's pay book, where 10 per cent was deduc­ted from every wage pay­ment.

The inhab­it­ants of the set­tle­ment were not allowed to leave their place of res­id­ence or work without per­mis­sion. If the need arose, a pass issued by the com­mand­ant's office was required, or one from the dis­trict NKVD rep­res­ent­at­ive if the person con­cerned worked out­side the set­tle­ment. In prac­tice, how­ever, we could move without a pass between our two set­tle­ments, Szom­boziero and Kat­iszcze, and to Glazanikha rail­way sta­tion, and we could walk in the forest and pick ber­ries. To go to the nearest vil­lage, Verkhovye, 15 km from Kat­iszcze, where pota­toes and other veget­ables could be bought, a pass was needed, but the com­mand­ant did not issue such passes.

The winter of 1940 was draw­ing to an end, and the snow, which lay a metre and a half deep, began slowly to melt and settle. On such set­tling snow one could walk on the sur­face without sink­ing in, because as it settled it became ever more com­pacted and bore a person's weight. But soon, around the middle of April, the thaw set in. The little stream flow­ing out of Lake Szom­boziero, called the Szom­bruczej, which ran through Kat­iszcze, turned during the thaw into a tor­rent fed by melt­water.

When the winter was over, the people of Szom­boziero and Kat­iszcze were sent to vari­ous kinds of work: log­ging, float­ing long tim­bers down the Onega towards the White Sea; and work on build­ing the rail­way from Kodino to Belo­morsk also got under way at great speed, and some of our com­pat­ri­ots found work there. In 1940 a 50-kilo­metre sec­tion from Obozer­sky to Kodino was com­pleted, leav­ing another 350 km to Belo­morsk. When the grass grew in the mead­ows, our people found work hay­mak­ing. This was con­sidered the light­est work, not demand­ing much effort, so older people and women were sent to it. But it was sea­sonal and could quickly be lost, and it was also poorly paid, at 3 roubles a day.

At Kat­iszcze work began on a third living hut. Evid­ently the com­mand­ant had decided that the exist­ing huts were over­crowded and fell short of the norm of 3 square metres per person. The build­ing went ahead quickly. Among our people at Kat­iszcze there were some who knew the trade, so the hut rose before our eyes and by about May 1940 it was ready to live in. It was built in the same style as the old huts, of round, debarked spruce logs laid one on another. The logs were hewn flat where they met, so that they lay against each other along their whole length, and the joints were caulked with moss so that there were no gaps, which also gave better insu­la­tion. The hut had a gabled roof and small glazed win­dows. Some of the people from the two most crowded old huts were moved into it, and some people were also brought over to Kat­iszcze from Szom­boziero, because the huts there were crowded too.

As it happened, my family was assigned to the new hut, while the Kolanowskis and Chmielews­kis stayed where they were, in hut no. 1. Our new hut had one cent­ral entrance and two side entrances to the living rooms. In all there were twelve rooms in the hut. Every three adjoin­ing rooms shared a stove in a common entrance hall, used for heat­ing and cook­ing. Cook­ing was done by set­ting a pot on the glow­ing embers in the hearth. But there was no crush at cook­ing time, because the food brought from Poland soon ran out and there was noth­ing to cook, while the shop at Szom­boziero sold only bread on ration cards, salt and par­affin for lamps. There was no groats, no flour and no oil to be had there, and one had to rely on meals from the canteen.

Our room was sep­ar­ated from the neigh­bour­ing rooms by a par­ti­tion of thin boards about two metres high; above it was an open gap of half a metre, then a plank ceil­ing and above that the slop­ing roof. Through the thin par­ti­tion one could hear everything that went on and was said next door, and worst of all, the par­ti­tion was full of bed­bugs, which were unbear­able at night. Our room, about 15 square metres in area, had a small window look­ing out onto the stream and onto the tractor track, made of thin poles laid across the road on the wet ground. While we were there, the tractor track was not in use, because log­ging in the area had fin­ished.

In our room there was a prim­it­ive wooden table, a bench to sit on, and in the corner a place to sleep, where at night we laid out a plank bunk with a straw mat­tress on top, and the whole family lay side by side. There was also a small bench by the wall for one person to sit on, where Daddy usu­ally sat during the peri­ods when he was unable to work and stayed at home. Next to us lived the Tereszkos. He was nearly sixty, a tall and very thin man, a dis­til­ler by trade, as he intro­duced him­self, that is, a worker in a dis­til­lery. His wife was much younger, and they had a sev­en­teen-year-old daugh­ter. After the winter of 1940 all three went to work, mostly hay­mak­ing. They often worked together, or mother and daugh­ter together and the father sep­ar­ately. Hay­mak­ing was not hard work, but one's head had to be spe­cially pro­tec­ted against the midges, which bit cruelly on any exposed skin in those marshy mead­ows. Tereszko often came home from work earlier than his wife and daugh­ter. Being hungry, he would put a large pot of water on our shared stove, bring it to the boil and throw diced bread into it. He called this dish kapłunek (“little capon”). As a worker he received 800 grams of bread, and with part of his ration he made this res­tor­at­ive meal. Its cal­or­ific value was small and it did not make up for the cal­or­ies spent at work. When we lay down to sleep on the bunk, our heads were against the par­ti­tion, on the other side of which were the Tereszkos' heads. There was little har­mony between them; they often hit each other with pil­lows. Usu­ally mother and daugh­ter were in coali­tion against the father. The worst thing was that our shared par­ti­tion swarmed with bed­bugs and it was hard to fall asleep. Often before going to sleep we would light the par­affin lamp and the hunt for bed­bugs would begin; in the light they were vis­ible, and Mother killed them with a metal crochet hook. There were bed­bugs between the ceil­ing boards too, and when people were asleep they dropped down onto the sleep­ers. I never saw these fall­ing bed­bugs myself, but every­one said that the bugs really had acquired this skill.

In the third room, beside the Tereszkos, lived the Pal­iński family. It was a family with a great many chil­dren; at the time I could not count them all. In fact there were nine of them: the par­ents and seven daugh­ters aged from two to thir­teen. Since Pal­iński was the only one work­ing and his wife looked after the chil­dren, he could not earn enough even to buy the bread ration and the por­ridge or noodle soup in the canteen, and the chil­dren began to die. Five daugh­ters died of hunger. I remem­ber the death of one of them, an eleven-year-old, who was laid out in our entrance hall in an open coffin knocked together from boards; what struck me most were the lice crawl­ing over the dead child's face. Such an image does not quickly fade from memory. I should add that in exile the Pal­ińs­kis had yet another daugh­ter. At Szom­boziero there also lived three grown-up chil­dren of Pal­iński's from his first mar­riage, a grown-up girl and two young men aged 18 and 20. The two young men were very pro­duct­ive in the forest and became famous as “Stakhan­ovites”, that is, shock work­ers. They earned well and were entitled to spe­cial food rations of such things as sugar, sweets, oil and per­haps some­thing else. The set­tle­ment com­mand­ant held them up to others as an example of how to work, but they did not have many imit­at­ors.

I would like to men­tion one more family living in our hut, the Matiases. They had been depor­ted from the set­tle­ment of Kobylaki, a dozen or so kilo­metres from Wołkow­ysk. He had been a game­keeper in the Wołkow­ysk Forest Dis­trict. The Matias family had seven mem­bers, includ­ing a ten-year-old boy, Bolek, with whom I was friends, and eight-year-old twin girls who played with my six-year-old sister Hania. Bolek died of dys­en­tery on the train in Octo­ber 1941 during our jour­ney to Kaza­kh­stan. Matias often talked with my Father, and I listened to their con­ver­sa­tions. One of them went like this: “Mr For­ester, we should try to escape from here to Poland. We'll take bas­kets with some food and walk through the forest until we reach our homes in Poland.” I do not know whether he meant it ser­i­ously or only wanted to hear my Father's opin­ion. Father, of course, judged the idea impossible, since Wołkow­ysk was 2,000 km away. But Matias evid­ently talked about his escape plan more widely, and it must have reached the com­mand­ant's office, because Matias was arres­ted. He was arres­ted but not sen­tenced, and after some time he came home.

An eld­erly couple, the Pereszczaks, also lived in our hut. They were old people, quite unfit for heavy phys­ical work in the forest, and not work­ing they had no money to live on and faced the pro­spect of soon dying of hunger. To be rid of the prob­lem, the com­mand­ant arranged a place for the Pereszczaks in a priyut, that is, an alms­house. The Pereszczaks went to the priyut, and how long they sur­vived there nobody knows, because no news was ever heard from them. They were prob­ably placed in a spe­cial Inval­ids' Home in the Pinega dis­trict, 200 km east of Arkhangelsk, where old people and inval­ids from the whole Arkhangelsk Oblast were sent.

After the Pereszczaks left, Mrs Jad­wiga Wróblewska, who had been moved from Szom­boziero to Kat­iszcze, moved into their room. My Mother became friends with Mrs Jad­wiga, who had two chil­dren: a ten-year-old daugh­ter, Irenka, and a five-year-old son, Marian. Mrs Jad­wiga came from Józe­fowo near Wołkow­ysk, where she and her hus­band had a large farm with a beau­ti­ful orch­ard. The Wróblews­kis stood out in the area for the size of their farm and the prosper­ity of their house­hold. Mrs Jad­wiga's hus­band was away from home at the time of the deport­a­tion: he had been warned of the planned deport­a­tion and had gone to Wilno to wait until the danger had passed. He escaped deport­a­tion, but in 1943, while at home in Józe­fowo, he was murdered in the fields by someone from the loc­al­ity, which Mrs Jad­wiga learnt only after the war, on return­ing home to Poland. Mrs Jad­wiga often came to see us for a chat, usu­ally with her little son Marian. Marian could already read quite well and showed off by read­ing from the first-year primer and recit­ing poems. His mother was delighted that her son was so tal­en­ted. Her daugh­ter Irenka began going to school in Szom­boziero once the school year star­ted.

Sev­eral times we were vis­ited at Kat­iszcze by Mr Józef Korzeniowski, a for­ester from near Wołkow­ysk, who lived at Szom­boziero; he brought books, and he and Father talked about cur­rent affairs. Mr Korzeniowski was a tall man and very obli­ging. He deserves my grat­it­ude, because he helped us greatly in our need when we were in Kaza­kh­stan in 1942.

Also living at Szom­boziero were Mr Labocha, with his wife and daugh­ter, and the Rozwad­owski family. I men­tion them because we met them in Kaza­kh­stan after leav­ing our set­tle­ment. Labocha, a for­ester by pro­fes­sion, vis­ited my Father at Kat­iszcze sev­eral times. It was said of Mr Labocha that before the war he had grown rich by win­ning a law­suit against a hos­pital for dam­ages. He was in poor health, and when he fell ill he was taken to hos­pital, where his con­di­tion deteri­or­ated so much that a doctor mis­takenly pro­nounced him dead. He was taken to the mor­tu­ary, but the patient had not died; he regained con­scious­ness, raised the alarm and was taken back to the ward. When he recovered, he sued the hos­pital for dam­ages for the addi­tional suf­fer­ing and moral harm caused by his stay in the mor­tu­ary. Reportedly the would-be corpse was awar­ded sub­stan­tial dam­ages. At the set­tle­ment Labocha hardly worked, plead­ing ill health, but he must also have had many things to sell, because he ate reas­on­ably well, and later he turned up with us in Kaza­kh­stan, in the town of Dzh­am­bul, in fairly good health.

In one of the old huts at Kat­iszcze lived a man named Chajan. It was with his son that I often walked to school at Szom­boziero. In Poland he had worked as a game­keeper. He had the appear­ance and man­ners of an edu­cated man. He said that before the war he had been a com­mun­ist, and com­plained that he had been depor­ted by mis­take, for which he bore a great grudge against the Soviet author­it­ies. Chajan boas­ted that in Septem­ber 1939 he had dis­armed scattered Polish sol­diers when the Sovi­ets marched in from the east. When our over­seer from the NKVD com­mand­ant's office, Yev­seyev, learnt that there was among us a man who declared him­self a com­mun­ist and a lover of the Soviet Union, he made him his assist­ant, an informer watch­ing over the Poles at Kat­iszcze. Chajan's duties included fre­quently vis­it­ing the fam­il­ies in the huts and report­ing to Yev­seyev any remarks or beha­viour that might be con­sidered hos­tile to the Soviet author­it­ies or the com­mun­ist system. Chajan spoke to the Poles in Rus­sian, and his son Tolo also spoke only Rus­sian. Besides his son he had a daugh­ter with the Rus­sian name Raisa, who was in the same class as me at school. Chajan often came to our hut, neatly dressed in officer's boots, and talked with Father about cur­rent affairs. I remem­ber his fre­quent char­ac­ter­istic phrase: “Pan Bach­miński, ya vam skazhu takuyu veshch” (Mr Bach­miński, let me tell you some­thing). These were calm con­ver­sa­tions, without polit­ical dis­putes. Father knew he was deal­ing with a man who had chosen to col­lab­or­ate with the author­it­ies. Instead of going to work in the forest and ruin­ing his health like all the other inhab­it­ants of our set­tle­ment, Chajan enjoyed the priv­ilege of not work­ing. He must cer­tainly have been paid by the com­mand­ant's office for his occu­pa­tion. The fact that sev­eral people from Kat­iszcze were arres­ted must have been Chajan's doing. Matias was arres­ted, and so were our two room­mates from hut no. 1, with whom we had lived at the very begin­ning after our arrival: Stefan Kolanowski and Stan­isław Chmielewski. Kolanowski was sen­tenced to ten years' impris­on­ment for counter-revolu­tion­ary pro­pa­ganda and agit­a­tion⁴. Chmielewski was indeed very out­spoken, and it was easy to find evid­ence that he was an enemy of the Soviet author­it­ies. Those arres­ted usu­ally ended up in the prison in Arkhangelsk, where they awaited trial and sen­tence⁵.

The com­mand­ant's office was at Szom­boziero; the com­mand­ant was at first Popov, who was later replaced by Nikolay­enko. But for us at Kat­iszcze the most import­ant rep­res­ent­at­ive of author­ity was Yev­seyev, who had our set­tle­ment under his super­vi­sion. He was one of the two assist­ants of the spe­cial set­tle­ment com­mand­ant and had full author­ity over the inhab­it­ants of Kat­iszcze. He often made the rounds of all the huts and talked with the inhab­it­ants. He wore the uni­form of an NKVD officer and car­ried a revolver in a hol­ster. He was a fairly young man, a not very tall blond, although some said, prob­ably out of spite, that he was ginger. He talked a good deal with my Father on vari­ous sub­jects during his visits. Father spoke fluent Rus­sian, because in Sosnowiec, then under Rus­sian rule, he had com­pleted a Real­noye Uchil­ishche (sec­ond­ary modern school) where the lan­guage of instruc­tion was Rus­sian. Yev­seyev did not pursue my Mother for not work­ing. Evid­ently he accep­ted that she was not fit for stack­ing metres and, besides, had to look after three chil­dren, includ­ing a six-year-old daugh­ter who needed con­stant care.

In Mother's forest worker's book I found only one entry, from May 1940, con­firm­ing work and pay for nine work­ing days. We had man­aged to bring from Poland a high-qual­ity Singer treadle sewing machine, so Mother tried to earn a little by sewing to order for our people. But evid­ently she was not the best of seam­stresses, and the orders soon dried up. Yev­seyev approved of Mother sewing to order and once asked:

– Bach­m­in­skaya, vy port­nikha? (Bach­mińska, are you a seam­stress?)

– Nyet, ya ne port­nikha (No, I'm not a seam­stress), Mother replied on the spur of the moment.

But she denied it because, not yet know­ing Rus­sian, she had taken the word port­nikha to mean partaczka, a Polish word for a botcher, and thought Yev­seyev was mock­ing her sewing skills. Only after Yev­seyev had left was everything cleared up, and there was some laughter. Even so, Yev­seyev remained con­vinced that Mother was a seam­stress doing useful work, and did not chase her off to the forest or the hay­mak­ing. In any case, by June 1940, four months after our arrival, Mother was show­ing symp­toms of hunger oedema; she had lost her strength and would not have been able to do any work.

From the day of the deport­a­tion my Father kept a daily record of import­ant events. Thanks to it I can describe the course of his work from the moment we arrived at Kat­iszcze. At the very begin­ning he was given a worker's pay book issued by the One­g­ales enter­prise, which gave his place of employ­ment as the enter­prise's branch at Kara­mino. Kara­mino was a vil­lage on the great Onega River, about 50 km from its mouth at the White Sea. At the mouth of the river stood the dis­trict town of Onega, seat of the dis­trict NKVD admin­is­tra­tion, to which our set­tle­ment com­mand­ant's office was sub­or­din­ate. Onega was about 55 km from Szom­boziero and Kara­mino about 20 km. Kara­mino was an import­ant place for us, because it had the post office through which we received let­ters, and some people food par­cels from Poland. Kara­mino was also the site of the tractor depot serving the whole area under the branch respons­ible for log­ging and trans­port­ing timber to the col­lec­tion points. Near Kara­mino there was also a work site known as the Base, where timber was floated down the Onega towards the White Sea. The long float­ing tim­bers were hauled ashore at a place called Porog and went from there to a timber-pro­cessing plant. Float­ing began once the ice had gone, in May, and con­tin­ued until Octo­ber, when the Onega began to freeze. At the very begin­ning, after arriv­ing at Kat­iszcze, Father was given work on the spot: in the first week load­ing logs, the next week clear­ing snow from the road by the huts, and in the fol­low­ing days log­ging. Having no insu­lated boots for spend­ing long hours in the frost, he suffered severe frost­bite of his big toe, as a result of which the med­ical assist­ant signed him off work for six weeks. During that time she came to Father sev­eral times and dressed the wound, dis­in­fect­ing it with potassium per­man­gan­ate, which I remem­ber because of its purple colour. When his sick leave ended, at the begin­ning of May 1940, he was sent to lighter work, clear­ing the ground after log­ging and burn­ing branches, and then, together with his thir­teen-year-old son Zbyszek, clear­ing mead­ows. There was also a period of three weeks at the turn of May and June when there was no work for him and he stayed at home.

But the light work soon came to an end, and in mid-June 1940 Father was sent to work at the Base, where a larger group of Poles was employed float­ing long tim­bers down the Onega. It was one of the hard­est jobs, con­sist­ing of haul­ing huge tim­bers to the riverb­ank by tractor or by hand and throw­ing them into the cur­rent. Father also did jobs such as bark­ing birch and spruce logs, that is, strip­ping the bark from logs inten­ded for float­ing. The Base was at Kara­mino, 20 km from Kat­iszcze. The work­ers employed there were quartered in huts and had a canteen on site with very wretched food; they could go home to Szom­boziero or Kat­iszcze on Sat­urday after work, walk­ing 20 km, but had to set off back on Sunday after­noon to be at work on Monday morn­ing. Father came home only once a fort­night, because it was a long way: after a hard day's work it meant a four-hour march, and on Sunday, after a short rest, the same dis­tance back. During the three months he worked at the Base, Father vis­ited us at Kat­iszcze five times. I remem­ber that he always arrived barely alive with exhaus­tion. He also told us that one day in the canteen he lost his temper when he was served oat por­ridge without any fat yet again; he flung his wooden spoon on the table and left the canteen hungry and furi­ous. When he vis­ited us he com­plained of dizzi­ness and symp­toms of the dis­ease called tsinga in Rus­sian, that is, scurvy caused by the lack of veget­ables in the diet.

Those three months of hard labour, with no meat, milk, butter or veget­ables in his diet, sapped his strength and ruined his health gen­er­ally. And the pay for this work was low, con­sid­er­ing that the money earned was sup­posed to sup­port the family. Accord­ing to the entries in Stan­isław Bach­miński's pay book, from March to Octo­ber 1940 he earned 570 roubles net (that is, after the 10 per cent tax deduc­ted to cover the costs of the NKVD com­mand­ant's office). Under this pay system no bene­fit was paid for sick leave. Over those eight months his pay aver­aged 70 roubles a month, which was not enough to buy the bread ration and canteen meals for the whole family. A kilo­gram of bread cost 1 rouble 20 kopecks, a por­tion of oat por­ridge 35 kopecks and a por­tion of noodle soup 58 kopecks. A family of five had to pay 7 roubles 50 kopecks a day for bread and these canteen dishes, that is, 230 roubles a month.

Stakhan­ovites such as the Pal­iński broth­ers, who exceeded the set work norms and earned well, could afford to order meat soup, sup myas­noy, in the canteen at Szom­boziero, which cost 1 rouble 5 kopecks. It con­tained a small piece of meat, but there was not much demand for so refined a dish. Although I was often in the canteen at Szom­boziero, I never dared to treat myself to sup myas­noy, so I cannot say any­thing about its taste. I always ordered noodle soup or por­ridge. Salted mush­rooms could also be had in the canteen, but they tasted foul and I took them only once, to try. At Szom­boziero there was a little shop, which I some­times looked into to see whether any­thing had been delivered that could be bought as a bar­gain. Once I met a couple of Polish Stakhan­ovites there who had come to buy boiled sweets and sugar with their spe­cial coupons, and I wit­nessed the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion:

– Yest' sakhar, yest' kon­fety? (Is there sugar, are there sweets?)

– Sakhara i konfet net (There's no sugar and no sweets), the shop assist­ant replied.

– A pochemu net? (And why not?)

– A potomu chto ne privezli (Because they weren't delivered.)

– A pochemu ne privezli? (And why weren't they delivered?)

– A potomu chto loshadey net (Because there are no horses.)

As one can see, trans­port dif­fi­culties also played a part in the lack of goods in the shop. In the end, though, the shock work­ers did get their ration of sweets, includ­ing arrears, some­times sev­eral kilo­grams at once.

The summer of 1940 was fairly warm and dry, with little rain. The Szom­bruczej stream, which flowed through Kat­iszcze 50 metres from our hut and turned into a large river during the thaw, ran quietly in summer, and since the ground was marshy, in places it dis­ap­peared under the moss and was in fact invis­ible. The inhab­it­ants of our hut took water from this stream for drink­ing and for all other pur­poses. In summer the days here were very long, and in July the sun set for only three hours: we had the so-called “white nights”, when one could even read without a lamp. When winter came, on the other hand, the sun appeared in Decem­ber and Janu­ary for only three or four hours, and the long polar night soon fell. This was because of our geo­graph­ical pos­i­tion: the Arctic Circle was only three hun­dred kilo­metres away. After the third hut was built, our set­tle­ment, Kat­iszcze, had about 90 inhab­it­ants, while about 400 people lived at the main set­tle­ment, Szom­boziero. I cannot say exactly how many people came to our two set­tle­ments in March 1940, although it was said to be five hun­dred. Accord­ing to the census taken by the com­mand­ant's office on 1 Janu­ary 1941, there were 476 of us alto­gether. Of these 476 people, 51, or 11 per cent, declared Belarus­ian nation­al­ity⁶. After ten months in exile our number had fallen from about 500 to 476, because people had begun to die. After 1 Janu­ary 1941, the date of the census, the inhab­it­ants of our two set­tle­ments died even faster, mainly from mal­nu­tri­tion and dis­eases res­ult­ing from their weakened bodies. The dead began to be buried in the forest by the road, halfway between Szom­boziero and Kat­iszcze. Because for ten months I went to school at Szom­boziero and passed that cemetery twice a day, I saw how quickly the number of graves grew. It was said that in the end there were about a hun­dred graves. By my own estim­ate, based on the list of names of people depor­ted to the Szom­boziero set­tle­ment⁷, the number of deaths in our two set­tle­ments over 19 months was about 65, or 13 per cent of the ori­ginal number.

Our exiles were under the con­stant watch of three officers of the com­mand­ant's office, whose task was not only to extract the max­imum from forced labour for min­imum pay; another import­ant aim of these rep­res­ent­at­ives of author­ity was to catch those who spoke crit­ic­ally about the Soviet Union, the NKVD, or the system of forced labour. People con­sidered dan­ger­ous to the author­it­ies began to be repressed, which meant arrests. Those arres­ted were sent to Onega for fur­ther inter­rog­a­tion and then ended up in cus­tody in Arkhangelsk, where they were tried by the NKVD Spe­cial Board or the Oblast Court and usu­ally sen­tenced to five or ten years in a labour camp, a gulag. In the autumn of 1940, when Father was work­ing on the con­struc­tion of the rail­way near Glazanikha sta­tion and I went to visit him at work after school and was walk­ing back to Szom­boziero, I saw an NKVD man, revolver in hand, march­ing 25-year-old Anatol Rozwad­owski, hand­cuffed and a few steps ahead of him, towards Glazanikha under arrest. On the same day 19-year-old Stan­isław Korzeniowski was also arres­ted. Both were tried in Arkhangelsk and sen­tenced. Korzeniowski received five years in a gulag for counter-revolu­tion­ary pro­pa­ganda and agit­a­tion⁸. Sev­eral other young men whose names I do not know were arres­ted at Szom­boziero. One may assume that about ten people in all were arres­ted from our two set­tle­ments. After his sen­tence Anatol Rozwad­owski was sent to the labour camp at Kodino, whose pris­on­ers worked on build­ing the Obozer­sky–Belo­morsk rail­way, but sadly he did not live to see the amnesty and died in that camp in 1941.

The short summer of 1940 passed quickly. I walked a great deal in the taiga, get­ting to know the nearby forest. Through our set­tle­ment, along a broad cut­ting in the forest, ran a road towards the town of Onega; it was no longer used to haul timber, but it was useful to me, as I could walk along it in a straight line, step­ping on the poles laid across the road to rein­force the marshy ground. It was a so-called “wooden road”. Along this road, on the wet ground, grew ber­ries like rasp­ber­ries called moroshka (cloud­ber­ries), grow­ing low on the ground, red at first and orange when ripe; they were valu­able as a source of vit­am­ins, though rather sour and not very tasty. I most liked pick­ing bil­ber­ries, of which there were plenty, and on the marshes I found pre­cious cran­ber­ries, but only in small quant­it­ies. There were also mush­rooms in the forest sim­ilar to our saf­fron milk caps, but they were excep­tion­ally unpal­at­able, so we did not pick them. Sadly there were no ceps, no birch boletes and no slip­pery jacks, which we knew from Poland. There were hares in the taiga, but nobody hunted them, because we had no fire­arms. Hares, as every­one knows, are fast and cannot be caught. But there was a time when some people man­aged it. In early summer young hares were born, and we boys from hut no. 5 organ­ised group chases after the lever­ets. When a leveret appeared near the hut, the whole gang of boys would rush after it. Since there were heaps of branches in the forest, the hare would run into them, which slowed its escape, and often it got well and truly tangled in the branches, and then it was ours. Unfor­tu­nately neither I nor my brother Zbyszek ever won at this hunt, and some other family had the feast. There were no fish in the stream by our hut at Kat­iszcze to sup­ple­ment our diet. I tried a few times to fish with a rod in Lake Szom­boziero, but my catches were very modest. Above all, I did not have a proper rod. I made a hook from a sewing needle, which I annealed and bent into shape, but the hook must have had some flaw, because I caught almost noth­ing.

Beside our hut, on a rather sandy hill­side, we found a patch of cleared ground, that is, with the roots of felled trees removed, and on this plot we and a few neigh­bours planted pota­toes. But the har­vest was quite wretched, because once the layer of forest litter was removed the soil was sandy, without organic matter. One of the inhab­it­ants of our set­tle­ment, how­ever, Mr Filik, planted a large patch of pota­toes on flat ground near our plot, and he grew great lux­uri­ant shoots and soon dug up splen­did tubers. The secret of his suc­cess was soon revealed. Filik, an expert in cul­tiv­a­tion, had spot­ted that near our hut there was a place where a stable had once stood and a good deal of horse manure had been left, and there he planted his pota­toes. It was no man's land, and who­ever took it first gained the right to use it. The agri­cul­tural know­ledge and sharp eye of the man who had spot­ted it paid off. I should add that the great major­ity of the inhab­it­ants of our two set­tle­ments were farm­ers. After Poland regained inde­pend­ence they had been given land as ordin­ary set­tlers or as mil­it­ary set­tlers. A small group at Szom­boziero and Kat­iszcze were game­keep­ers and for­est­ers (Walerian Wyso­cki in his Mem­oirs says there were only ten for­est­ers there).

There were no wolves in the taiga, but there were elk and bears. Although I walked a great deal in the taiga, I never met a bear. Janek Czarniecki, who lived at Szom­boziero, told us that near their set­tle­ment he had come across a she-bear with her cubs, but for­tu­nately he with­drew quickly without being noticed. A few other people also told of meet­ing brown bears, but none of them was attacked. In winter, walk­ing along the road, one passed many rowan trees with beau­ti­ful red ber­ries. But rowan ber­ries were not fit to eat because of their tart taste, and nobody picked them. In winter I usu­ally went to school on skis. When snow had fallen in the night, on my way to school in the morn­ing I would see many animal tracks cross­ing the road. But they were not the tracks of large anim­als, only of smal­ler ones such as hares, martens, foxes and others that I could not identify from their tracks.

All the inhab­it­ants of our two set­tle­ments suffered from mal­nu­tri­tion. Some who had family left in the ter­rit­or­ies occu­pied by the Sovi­ets wrote to them for help, and food par­cels con­tain­ing pork fat, butter, oil and sugar did indeed begin to arrive. Thanks to these par­cels people could briefly improve their phys­ical con­di­tion. Mother bought a pat of butter from someone who had received a food parcel, but the butter was rancid and tasted bitter. Even so, we soon ate it, and it was the only butter I ate during our whole stay at Kat­iszcze. The inhab­it­ants of our two set­tle­ments also began cor­res­pond­ing with their fam­il­ies, although incom­ing let­ters bore the marks of cen­sor­ship. Some­times the censor would cut out with scis­sors sen­tences con­tain­ing what he con­sidered harm­ful con­tent. In fact we were cut off from polit­ical news about the war going on in Europe. Some people received coded inform­a­tion about cur­rent events in their let­ters, but it was not encour­aging. I wit­nessed a letter arriv­ing for one of the fam­il­ies in hut no. 1, which was read aloud to a larger group of neigh­bours. It began: “In the first words of this letter, praised be Jesus Christ. We are well, and wish you the same.” This was a for­mula com­monly used at the start of a letter. Fur­ther on there was a coded mes­sage about the polit­ical situ­ation in west­ern Europe. It went more or less like this: in our vil­lage Niko­dem had a quar­rel with Bolek, Franek and Antek, it came to a fight, and Niko­dem won. Every­one guessed that Niko­dem stood for Niemcy (Ger­many), Bolek for Bel­gium, Franek for France and Antek for Anglia (Eng­land). The letter had been cen­sored, but this coded mes­sage had been let through because it was polit­ic­ally neut­ral, while in a couple of places the censor had used his scis­sors. Such coded inform­a­tion was of little value, but I saw how eagerly people drank in this news, although it gave no hope that any­thing might change for the better for us here in the taiga. In fact we knew little of what was hap­pen­ing in Europe, and this was the time when Ger­many was con­quer­ing Den­mark, Norway, Bel­gium, Hol­land and France, and the friend­ship pact between Ger­many and the USSR was still in force.

We never received a food parcel from Poland, since we had no close rel­at­ives on the Soviet-occu­pied side, and from the part of the coun­try occu­pied by Ger­many, where we had family, food par­cels could not be sent. We received only one parcel, con­tain­ing clothes, from Mother's sister under German occu­pa­tion in Suched­niów (Kielce Voivode­ship). These things had little com­mer­cial value, but they could be sold to Rus­si­ans. To save ourselves from hunger we began selling vari­ous things we had man­aged to bring with us from Wołkow­ysk. They were bought by Rus­si­ans who came to our set­tle­ment to shop. These were officers super­vising the labour camps, some­times offi­cials from Onega or people super­vising the rail­way con­struc­tion, often accom­pan­ied by their wives. The things we had to sell were eagerly bought, since they were of good qual­ity and such things were not to be had even in their big cities. There was, though, one Rus­sian woman from Len­in­grad who bought some­thing from us and claimed that in Len­in­grad one could buy things as good as ours. Most valu­able of all, how­ever, was that in many cases the Rus­si­ans paid not only in roubles but also in kind, for example with oil, flour, groats and, in winter, frozen fish.

The buyers must have arranged their trad­ing visits to our huts with the com­mand­ant, since Yev­seyev did not inter­fere in these mat­ters and did not pursue either us or the buyers for trad­ing. We had brought quite a lot of valu­able things from Poland, and selling them gave us money to buy bread and canteen meals. I still have the list of things we sold, the most valu­able of which was the Singer treadle sewing machine, for which we were paid 1,250 roubles plus 6 kg of fish, a litre of oil and 6 kg of wheat flour. There was a second valu­able trans­ac­tion paid in cash and food: for Mother's “Eng­lish” suit we received 300 roubles and 10 kg of frozen fish, 15 kg of bread, 6 kg of wheat flour, 4 kg of peas and 1 kg of pork fat. We kept the fish for sev­eral weeks in the sub-zero tem­per­at­ure out­side the hut, hidden under the fire­wood. The fish lasted for many meals and was espe­cially wel­come on Christ­mas Eve, 24 Decem­ber 1940. Accord­ing to Father's notes, for all the things we sold we received 4,900 roubles in cash, and the food we received was worth 430 roubles.

The inhab­it­ants of our set­tle­ment were con­demned to wretched food that led to loss of strength and deteri­or­at­ing health. All one could buy was bread on ration cards, the so-called payok, a ration of 800 grams for a work­ing person and 400 grams for a non-work­ing one, and in the canteen there were usu­ally two dishes: oat por­ridge and a flour soup, the so-called zaci­erka, made with water and per­haps fla­voured with a few drops of oil. At first the poor diet did not show in people's health, but after a few months people began to fall ill from under­nour­ish­ment. Infec­tious dis­eases also appeared, such as typhus and dys­en­tery, as well as night blind­ness, whose suf­fer­ers could see noth­ing at dusk. Mrs Kolanowska, our former room­mate from hut no. 1, fell gravely ill with typhus. I once met her on my way to Szom­boziero as she was being car­ried back to Kat­iszcze on a volok­usha (drag sledge), her head shaved, return­ing from hos­pital. People also began to suffer from scurvy, which, like night blind­ness, was caused by the lack of veget­ables in the diet. A dan­ger­ous dis­ease linked to mal­nu­tri­tion also appeared, called hunger oedema or hunger dis­ease. The swell­ing began in the lower legs and moved upwards until it reached the abdo­men, while the suf­ferer lost strength. Accord­ing to the med­ical defin­i­tion, “hunger dis­ease is a set of symp­toms occur­ring in star­va­tion, with a par­tic­u­lar defi­ciency of pro­tein and vit­am­ins. Its most char­ac­ter­istic symp­tom is so-called hunger oedema, such as dropsy of the lower limbs and abdom­inal dropsy."

The Soviet author­it­ies can be accused of a delib­er­ate method of bring­ing about the death of many depor­ted Poles by for­cing them to do hard labour in the taiga on star­va­tion rations, with no meat, veget­ables or fats. In our set­tle­ment one could hear officers of the NKVD com­mand­ant's office say things like:

– My vas zdes' privezli, chtoby vy podokhli (We brought you here so that you would croak).

or

– Nichego, ne pomry­osh', a kak pomry­osh', pok­horonim (Don't worry, you won't die, and if you do, we'll bury you).

or

– Kto ne rab­otayet, tot ne kush­ayet (He who does not work, does not eat).

These last words were taken from Lenin. Remarks of this kind were quite fre­quent. The rep­res­ent­at­ives of author­ity also often repeated that we had been depor­ted here navsegda, that is, for ever. For us Poles this was a very pain­ful truth, borne out by the example of the depor­ted Ukrain­ian kulaks, who had not been able to return to Ukraine.

I have in my pos­ses­sion a letter writ­ten by my Mother to her mother and sister, who lived in the Kielce Voivode­ship under German occu­pa­tion. It is a kind of doc­u­ment describ­ing our situ­ation after four months in exile. Here is the ver­batim text of the first part of the letter:

“2 July 1940. Sixth Kat­iszcze. Soviet Russia [...] I shall describe to you the sad moments of our life that we have been through and are going through now. On 10 Feb­ru­ary this year we were taken from our home at gun­point and depor­ted to Soviet Russia, to the White Sea near Arkhangelsk. We were allowed to take clothes, under­wear, bed­ding, a little food and a few pots from our home; everything else we left behind: fur­niture, china, pic­tures, 300 kilos of flour and other things. This is already my second letter, because the first surely never reached you. We live in the forest, 50 kilo­metres from the rail­way, in huts with sev­eral fam­il­ies together; our room is 5 metres long and 3 metres wide. We live only on bread, water and noodle soup, plain or with a little oil; no fats of any kind can be had here, some­times there are groats, we never see milk, as there is no vil­lage any­where near, we deportees are alone in the depths of the forest. There is a Soviet kit­chen here where they cook food for us, and apart from that we cannot buy any­thing to live on. We have to pay dearly for these meals. Every­one here works as a forest labourer, felling trees, stack­ing metres, load­ing timber onto tract­ors, float­ing it and so on. Henio worked in the forest, and in winter even I with Zbyszek and Kazik stacked metres. Then Henio got frost­bite in his feet, so that for a month he could not go to work. Now he works at the Base 20 kilo­metres from home and comes home every two weeks. His work is hard; he rolls timber into the Onega River, whole logs, it is piece­work. He cannot earn enough for all of us to live on, so I am selling the dresses I brought, whatever I have, so as to sur­vive with the chil­dren. I cannot work myself, because I have no strength. My legs are swell­ing from lack of food and the damp cli­mate; the air here is unhealthy, noth­ing but marshes and lakes. Life is very hard and sad for us; may God let us return to our own parts. Dear Mother and Mania, such a hard fate has befallen us; per­haps you could help us a little by send­ing a food parcel with butter, pork fat and sugar. Every­one here receives eight-kilo par­cels from Belarus. Mania, find out whether par­cels can be sent from you to Russia, because I have no fat left, everything I brought from home is gone. We are as if in prison; we are not allowed to go any­where or move a step away, because we are watched. We do not know whether we shall ever get out of here, or when; per­haps never [...]”

This letter is an import­ant doc­u­ment illus­trat­ing the hope­less situ­ation in which we found ourselves. I was able to follow the course of hunger oedema at close quar­ters, because its symp­toms appeared in my Mother. At first her legs began to swell around the ankles, and it did not look ser­i­ous, but then the swell­ing spread to her whole legs and began to move ever higher. What was aston­ish­ing was that the symp­toms had appeared as early as June 1940, only four months after we arrived at the set­tle­ment. We had some med­ical care in the form of the med­ical post at Szom­boziero, run by a med­ical assist­ant, but she had no medi­cine for hunger dis­ease. It must be admit­ted that in cases of more ser­i­ous ill­ness the med­ical post referred patients to the hos­pital at Chekuyevo, a vil­lage on the Onega River 40 km from Kat­iszcze. In Septem­ber 1940 my Mother was referred to the hos­pital, when the swell­ing had already reached her waist and she was very weak alto­gether. Because Mother was being sent to hos­pital, Father, who was work­ing at the Base, began trying to get a trans­fer to work closer to Kat­iszcze so that he could look after the chil­dren while his wife was away. The NKVD officer super­vising the Base agreed to trans­fer Father to work nearer home. This was work on the con­struc­tion of the rail­way near Glazanikha sta­tion, 5 km from Kat­iszcze. Accord­ing to Father's notes, his work on the rail­way con­sisted of clear­ing the route on which the tracks were to be laid. To build a rail­way, the taiga first had to be cut to create a tree­less cor­ridor, the stumps of the felled trees grubbed out, the ground con­sol­id­ated, embank­ments raised where the ground fell and cut­tings dug where it rose, and finally the track laid. The line ran straight ahead and often crossed marsh­land, which took extra effort to sta­bil­ise, and the neces­sary bridges also had to be built.

Father worked on the rail­way only briefly, but he got into ser­i­ous trouble there because he tried to buy from one of the pris­on­ers work­ing there a pair of valenki, tall boots of hard felt, good in frost, which he needed for the winter. Someone denounced him to the com­mand­ant over this trans­ac­tion. Such trad­ing with pris­on­ers was for­bid­den. Father did not want to talk about the details of the incid­ent, but he was locked up for it in the cells at Szom­boziero, although he was released after a few days.

The rail­way link­ing Obozer­sky with Belo­morsk was being built at great speed, using large num­bers of zaklyuchonnye, that is, pris­on­ers. The pris­on­ers were sup­plied by the NKVD's Main Admin­is­tra­tion of North­ern Rail­way Labour Camps, Sor­ok­lag. Con­struc­tion by pris­on­ers was organ­ised so that every few kilo­metres a labour camp, a lager, also called a penal colony, was set up, in which the pris­on­ers lived in make­shift wooden huts sur­roun­ded by a high fence with two watchtowers, from which the strelki (armed guards) kept the whole colony under obser­va­tion. These penal colon­ies, kolonny in Rus­sian, were numbered, and once the assigned stretch of work was fin­ished the pris­on­ers were moved a few kilo­metres fur­ther on, where a new colony was set up. One of these colon­ies was near Glazanikha sta­tion, and when the pris­on­ers left it after fin­ish­ing their work, I had the chance to walk round the aban­doned huts. The huts were built of planks as make­shift quar­ters for the pris­on­ers close to the con­struc­tion site. I went there hoping to find some­thing of value. In the summer of 1940 con­struc­tion was in full swing near Glazanikha sta­tion and advan­cing rap­idly towards the town of Onega. The fol­low­ing year, 1941, pas­sen­ger trains were already run­ning on the line to Onega. One day at Glazanikha sta­tion I sold bil­ber­ries I had picked in the forest to the pas­sen­gers of one such train. One of the pas­sen­gers talked to me and asked about the fate of the depor­ted Poles living in the nearby set­tle­ment, and at the end praised me for being so good at selling, saying: “Vot molo­dets mal­chik!” (What a clever lad!). The rail­way from Obozer­sky to Belo­morsk was of stra­tegic import­ance, since it provided a safe link between the Moscow region and Mur­mansk, the ice-free port on the Kola Pen­in­sula. Work went on sim­ul­tan­eously at vari­ous points along the planned route, which speeded up con­struc­tion. When war with Ger­many broke out on 22 June 1941, and the Ger­mans very quickly, on 8 Septem­ber, encircled Len­in­grad, and in Octo­ber 1941 the battle for Moscow began, the rail link to Mur­mansk bypassing the Len­in­grad area became very import­ant, because from Decem­ber 1941 Amer­ican and Brit­ish con­voys with mil­it­ary equip­ment began arriv­ing in Mur­mansk. This equip­ment could reach the rear of the front from Mur­mansk without hindrance along the new rail­way via Belo­morsk to Obozer­sky and on south towards Moscow. I ima­gine that the NKVD's Main Admin­is­tra­tion of North­ern Rail­way Labour Camps, with its vast reserves of camp pris­on­ers, mobil­ised them so that the rail­way could be put into ser­vice quickly. But we left our place of exile in Octo­ber 1941 and could not see whether trans­ports of mil­it­ary equip­ment were run­ning from Belo­morsk through Glazanikha.

It should be men­tioned that the Soviet author­it­ies were cap­able of mobil­ising huge num­bers of pris­on­ers to build import­ant pro­jects. So it was in 1931–1933, when the White Sea–Baltic Canal was built. More than 100,000 pris­on­ers were mobil­ised to build the canal link­ing the White Sea with the Baltic, and this great canal was built in less than two years.

Since Mother had been referred to the hos­pital at Chekuyevo, Father obtained per­mis­sion from the com­mand­ant's office to take her there, so he broke off his work clear­ing the rail­way route and had to find some means of trans­port. The com­mand­ant's office gave him a pod­voda in the form of a volok­usha with a driver. A volok­usha was a kind of short sledge drawn by a horse, cer­tainly not very com­fort­able for car­ry­ing a sick person, but a wheeled cart would not have been much better on those narrow forest roads. Volok­ushas were used here in summer and winter alike. Chekuyevo was 40 km away; the little set­tle­ment with the hos­pital lay on the Onega River. The jour­ney to the hos­pital by this con­vey­ance must have taken sev­eral hours, and Father had to walk back. Alto­gether the trip to Chekuyevo took him four days.

While Mother was in hos­pital, from 24 Septem­ber to 24 Octo­ber 1940, a whole month, Father worked some­where near our set­tle­ment, but his diary ends on 30 Septem­ber 1940, and there is only a note that after return­ing from Chekuyevo he spent the last days of Septem­ber burn­ing branches left after log­ging. While Mother was away, my brother and I went to school at Szom­boziero, and our six-year-old sister stayed at home alone. As I remem­ber, our biggest prob­lem at that time was lice. Want­ing to get rid of them, I had to do some­thing. I should add that on 6 Octo­ber 1940 I turned twelve and was grown-up enough to solve this dif­fi­cult prob­lem on my own. I took the cover off the quilt and the pil­low­cases, added the sheets, car­ried the lot to the banya, or bath­house, threw it into a large cauldron of water, lit a fire under the cauldron and boiled the bed linen for a long time. I hoped the lice would be boiled to death and we would be rid of them once and for all. Alas! When the bed linen had dried and our family bed was made up for the night, the lice went on biting cruelly. The battle against lice was hope­less, and they stayed with us to the end of our time at Kat­iszcze, and after­wards in Kaza­kh­stan, and even later in Iran.

Mother's treat­ment in hos­pital went well, as we learnt from the two post­cards she sent. Here is the text of the first, dated 1 Octo­ber 1940:

“My dears! Today is my sixth day in hos­pital. My health has improved, but the swell­ing has not yet gone down. The doctor says that after 14 days the swell­ing will begin to sub­side. So my stay in hos­pital is expec­ted to be longer, from 3 to 4 weeks. May God let me get through this. The food here is good, milk-based. I am also taking medi­cines. I wonder whether you, Henio, are work­ing at Glazanikha or near home. Are the boys going to school? The chil­dren must dress warmly. Hanusia must wear her tights and winter coat. Zbysio and Kazio must keep the house tidy. They should salt the mush­rooms. Try to buy ber­ries and make pre­serves. When I am to come home I shall let you know by post­card or by tele­phone to Glazanikha. Pota­toes, cab­bage and onions can be bought here, so bring sacks with you. When I have to travel back, as soon as I write, ask the com­mand­ant for a cart [...]”

After a month in hos­pital Mother's swell­ing had gone, but, as she wrote of her­self from hos­pital, she was weak and needed a cart to get home. Father obtained a pod­voda and went to Chekuyevo to bring Mother back. When she returned she told us that she had had a very kind doctor. When she was com­pletely well, he shook her hand and said: “Warsaw is ours!” Mother guessed that he may have had some family con­nec­tion with Poland, but did not want to admit it.

I would like to describe an incid­ent that took place at Kat­iszcze in late autumn 1940. An old woman went alone deep into the taiga with a basket to pick ber­ries and could not find her way home. When it grew dark her family began search­ing, but without result, because the taiga stretched end­lessly in all dir­ec­tions, full of bogs, marshes and fallen trees. Their calls went unanswered. When day came, the people of Kat­iszcze were mobil­ised and a larger search began. A whole day of search­ing by a con­sid­er­able number of people brought no result, and the miss­ing woman spent another night some­where in the taiga without warm cloth­ing, while the tem­per­at­ure at night could already fall below zero. On the next day Yev­seyev joined in organ­ising the search, and a great many people from Kat­iszcze took part. One of the search­ers came across the woman sit­ting under a tree, half-con­scious, frozen and close to death. Thanks to the solid­ar­ity of her com­pat­ri­ots, everything ended hap­pily.

I have already men­tioned that I went to school.

The school opened in July 1940. Since there was no free hut in which to hold les­sons, a new hut was built for the school. Like all the others it was built of long round spruce logs, but it was small and had a single classroom. The hut stood near the lake on marshy ground. It was built on piles driven into the wet ground. The piles were tarred, and the tar came from a tar kiln. To make tar, grubbed-out tree stumps were thrown into a deep pit, a fire was lit, the smoul­der­ing wood was covered with a layer of earth, and with little air and at high tem­per­at­ure the resin in the wood turned into black tar. The tar pro­tec­ted the piles driven into the wet ground from rot­ting quickly.

Les­sons in the newly built school hut began in Septem­ber 1940. My elder brother and I were placed in the fourth year of primary school. This class took in those who had com­pleted the fourth or fifth year before the war, mostly twelve- or thir­teen-year-olds, born in 1928 and 1927. Those who had fin­ished the sixth year, usu­ally born in 1926, went to work and there was no place for them in the school. A third year was organ­ised for the younger ones. In the classroom the teacher taught pupils of the third and fourth years at the same time. The third-year pupils sat in one row of desks and the fourth-year pupils in another, and while the teacher taught one class “aloud”, the other did writ­ten work “quietly”. A sim­ilar system of teach­ing was prac­tised in Poland after inde­pend­ence, as my Mother, who was a teacher, told me. When com­puls­ory school­ing was intro­duced, many vil­lages organ­ised a school by the vil­lage head giving the teacher a room rented from a farmer, where the teacher taught two classes in par­al­lel. Our teacher was Aleksandr Kasy­anov, a man of about thirty. He wore NKVD uni­form, but he was a qual­i­fied teacher and man­aged quite well teach­ing sev­eral sub­jects. In my fourth year he taught Rus­sian, arith­metic, his­tory, nat­ural sci­ence and draw­ing. In Rus­sian les­sons we sang sol­diers' songs glor­i­fy­ing the war deeds of Civil War heroes such as Cha­payev and Budy­onny, and extolling the fight­ing strength and weaponry of the Soviet army. There were also songs prais­ing Stalin and com­mand­ers such as Timoshenko and Voroshilov. Here is a frag­ment of one of those songs: “S nami Stalin rodnoy, Timoshenko geroy, i k pobede vedyot Voroshilov” (With us is our beloved Stalin and the hero Timoshenko, and Voroshilov leads us to vic­tory). It must be said that we also sang one song that had noth­ing to do with war: “Katy­usha”, a great hit of those times. Kasy­anov had a good voice and the class sang will­ingly, although the heroes of those songs were not our heroes. In our school text­book there was a poem that had to be learnt by heart, telling how school­chil­dren caught a spy who had crossed the state border. I still remem­ber almost the whole poem. It encour­aged young boys to be vigil­ant and unmask enemies of the state, as the pupils in the poem had done. In Rus­sian les­sons Aleksandr Kasy­anov made us learn by heart two fables by Krylov, the great Rus­sian fabulist. I learnt them without dif­fi­culty and can still recite them from memory. The first was called “Zerkalo i obezy­ana” (The Mirror and the Monkey), and the second “Lebed', shchuka i rak” (The Swan, the Pike and the Cray­fish). Besides us Polish pupils, there was in the fourth year Katya Sho­lok­hova, the daugh­ter of a Rus­sian employed by the com­mand­ant's office to look after the horses. Katya was a very good pupil, with otlichno, that is, excel­lent, in all sub­jects, and we had no con­flicts with her in class. She spoke Rus­sian with a sing-song accent, which may have meant that she came from some vil­lage where people spoke like that.

Sev­eral boys went to school from Kat­iszcze, as well as Irenka Wróblewska, a year younger than me, our neigh­bour on the other side of the wall in our hut. It was two kilo­metres to Szom­boziero; in autumn and spring the walk along the forest road was quite easy, but in the winter of 1940/1941 it was much worse, because the frosts were severe, snow fell con­stantly and the track had to be broken again and again. In winter my brother Zbyszek and I had an easier time get­ting to school, because we went on skis. Zbyszek, who was good with his hands, carved skis from a felled birch, short cross-coun­try skis that served excel­lently for moving quickly over the snow. Before winter set in we usu­ally walked to school in a group. From my hut came Gojlik, whose grown-up status I envied when he announced that he had turned fif­teen. Tolo Chajan also often walked with us, the son of that full-time col­lab­or­ator of the com­mand­ant's office about whom I wrote at greater length earlier. On our walks Tolo spun long tales of his father's war deeds during the First World War. Whose side Chajan had fought on was hard to make out; at any rate, in his son's story he was always in com­mand of a small unit and car­ried out import­ant combat mis­sions.

Right at the begin­ning there was a clash with our teacher. He found a scout's note­book belong­ing to one of the pupils, and his atten­tion was caught by a page with a set of scout sym­bols used in scout­ing field games, in so-called track­ing games. One of these scout sym­bols was a swastika, mean­ing “Warn­ing, danger!”. Aleksandr Kasy­anov, teacher and NKVD officer at the same time, showed revolu­tion­ary vigil­ance and began an invest­ig­a­tion into the mean­ing of the swastika, asking: “Chto eto takoye?” (What is this?)

None of us yet knew Rus­sian well enough to explain to him that the symbol was not an incite­ment to fight the revolu­tion. The teacher went on invest­ig­at­ing for a long time, shout­ing loudly and repeat­ing: “Eto kon­trre­voly­ut­siya!” (This is counter-revolu­tion!) But in the end he calmed down, seeing that no polit­ical affair could be made of it. The second incid­ent at school con­cerned my brother and me and had a polit­ical back­ground. Aleksandr Kasy­anov began a nat­ural sci­ence lesson. He took a piece of chalk and wrote on the board: PISHCHA (food), and said that this would be the sub­ject of today's lesson. Then he asked:

– Chto eto takoye pishcha? (What is food?)

– Por­ridge! I exclaimed.

– Noodle soup! my brother added.

The teacher read our inten­tions cor­rectly: that we wanted to express our dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the qual­ity of the food we were fed, and he took our answer as a polit­ical pro­voca­tion. We did indeed want to needle him as a rep­res­ent­at­ive of the author­it­ies who starved hard-work­ing people without provid­ing them with proper nour­ish­ment. As a result Aleksandr Kasy­anov flew into a great rage and began shout­ing, call­ing us counter-revolu­tion­ar­ies. The row went on for quite a while. It ended with him telling us to come to school the next day with our father or mother. But our par­ents ignored the sum­mons and did not come to school, and the teacher never returned to the matter, because in fact there was little he could do to us. He did, how­ever, remem­ber my counter-revolu­tion­ary remark, and on my fourth-year cer­ti­fic­ate he gave me only “sat­is­fact­ory” for con­duct. In this way I was branded. School ended on 30 May 1941. After that my brother and I went to work. It was light work: we tidied the ground along the road from Kat­iszcze to Szom­boziero, gath­er­ing the branches lit­ter­ing the forest into heaps, making a pile and burn­ing them. We enjoyed the work, because it was June and the weather was fine and sunny. And one day, while we were work­ing by the road, our teacher Aleksandr Kasy­anov came along from the dir­ec­tion of Szom­boziero. He noticed us, came over and said:

– Zdravstvuyte, mal­chiki! Chto vy zdes' delayete? (Good morn­ing, boys! What are you doing here?)

– Ter­ebim golyo (We're clear­ing branches), we replied.

– Vot khorosho (That's good), Kasy­anov replied, and added: – Odnako vy dolzhny yekhat' v Onegu, uchit'sya dal'she v shkole, okonchit' sem' klas­sov, i togda vy budete kval­ifit­siro­vannymi rabochimi (But you ought to go to Onega to con­tinue at school and com­plete seven years, and then you will be skilled work­ers).

We parted from our teacher on friendly terms, but his wish for our future careers as skilled work­ers in the taiga did not come true. On 22 June 1941 Ger­many attacked Soviet Russia, and soon the spet­sper­eselen­tsy became free people, and my brother and I lost our chance of becom­ing skilled lesor­uby (lum­ber­jacks).

When we were depor­ted on 10 Feb­ru­ary 1940, Father, who was employed as a for­ester in Wołkow­ysk, had not yet received his salary for Janu­ary 1940. Once at the set­tle­ment, Father imme­di­ately wrote to his employer in Wołkow­ysk demand­ing pay­ment. Unfor­tu­nately the money did not come, so Father wrote a com­plaint to the Dis­trict NKVD Com­mand­ant's Office in Onega asking for its inter­ven­tion. The inter­ven­tion was suc­cess­ful, and a notice came from the post office in Kara­mino that 808 roubles had arrived. Going to the post office in Kara­mino, 20 km away, required a pass from the com­mand­ant to leave the set­tle­ment. The com­mand­ant issued a pass that read: “This pass has been issued to spe­cial reset­tler of Spe­cial Set­tle­ment no. 68, Bach­miński Stan­isław. He is per­mit­ted to go to the post office in Kara­mino. Valid until 24.11.1940.” It was stamped with a tri­an­gu­lar stamp bear­ing the words Del­eg­a­tion No. 68 in the middle and, around the edge: NKVD USSR, Arkhangelsk Admin­is­tra­tion.

The money sent from Wołkow­ysk was very pre­cious to us. It was the salary for Janu­ary and nine days of Feb­ru­ary 1940. A for­ester's salary was 600 roubles a month, while here a forest labourer could earn 100 to 150 roubles, which shows the scale of the degrad­a­tion. The money was very wel­come, because from Novem­ber 1940 Father was no longer earn­ing, being con­stantly on sick leave; his health was stead­ily deteri­or­at­ing, and in winter the frost­bite in his toe returned. His health was so bad that on 12 August 1941 the Vracheb­naya Komis­siya, the Med­ical Board, con­vened as required at Szom­boziero and con­sist­ing of a chair­man and a med­ical assist­ant, issued a decision (a pho­to­graph of the sur­viv­ing doc­u­ment is below) that Bach­miński Stan­isław Ivan­ovich, aged 49, suffered from a heart con­di­tion, was unfit for work and was clas­si­fied in the second invalid­ity group. Soon after, in the last ten days of August, he was in hos­pital at Chekuyevo with symp­toms of hunger oedema, although the med­ical assist­ant described the ill­ness in the hos­pital cer­ti­fic­ate as chronic myocarditis. They described all these hunger-related ill­nesses as heart defects, porok ser­dtsa, or myocarditis. Unfor­tu­nately his stay in hos­pital lasted only ten days, and Father was dis­charged but not cured. The reason for his pre­ma­ture dis­charge was the author­it­ies' decision to empty the hos­pital and keep beds in reserve for sol­diers wounded at the front. It was already the third month of the war between the Sovi­ets and Ger­many, and hos­pital beds far behind the lines were urgently needed.