Amnesty

We learnt of the great defeats of the Soviet army in the war with Ger­many from people work­ing at the Base, who had some inform­a­tion from news­pa­pers and also talked with the Rus­si­ans float­ing timber along­side them. My Father, too, while in hos­pital, read the Rus­sian press and had plenty of fresh news from the front. Even the NKVD men who super­vised us began to admit, with embar­rass­ment, that their nepobedimaya strana, their invin­cible coun­try, was suf­fer­ing a humi­li­at­ing defeat. With con­sid­er­able delay the news reached us of the Agree­ment con­cluded in London on 30 July 1941 between Władysław Sikor­ski, Prime Min­is­ter of the Repub­lic of Poland, and Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambas­sador to Great Bri­tain. Most import­ant for us was that on 12 August 1941 the Presi­dium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree grant­ing an amnesty to Polish cit­izens imprisoned on Soviet ter­rit­ory. In August 1941 the number of Polish cit­izens arres­ted, sen­tenced to labour camps, depor­ted, held as pris­on­ers of war or interned stood at 391,575. In all, 389,041 people were released under the amnesty⁹.

News of the amnesty reached us in mid-August 1941. The com­mand­ant called a meet­ing at Szom­boziero of all the adult inhab­it­ants of our two set­tle­ments. Nobody knew what the pur­pose of the meet­ing was. Both my par­ents went. After a short polit­ical intro­duc­tion the com­mand­ant announced the decision on the amnesty, which came as a great sur­prise to every­one and was at the same time very moving news. The com­mand­ant told them that the Polish and Soviet gov­ern­ments had con­cluded an agree­ment and under­taken to fight together against their common enemy, Ger­many. All the inhab­it­ants of our two set­tle­ments were amnestied, which meant that they would no longer be sub­ject to the repress­ive author­ity of the com­mand­ant's office and would have the right to live freely any­where in the USSR. All adults would soon receive udostoveren­iya, cer­ti­fic­ates of amnesty, and would be able to leave their place of exile and go to more hos­pit­able regions of the USSR. Those present greeted the news with enthu­si­asm. They sang “Poland Is Not Yet Lost” and there was great rejoicing. When my par­ents came back from the meet­ing they were very moved and gave a detailed account of how it had gone.

The udostoveren­iya soon arrived, and it was decided that we would be able to leave fairly soon for some­where in the south of the USSR, all together in one train. The dis­trict NKVD author­it­ies in Onega worked act­ively with the rep­res­ent­at­ives appoin­ted by our com­pat­ri­ots to organ­ise the depar­ture. The des­tin­a­tion of our jour­ney was given as the town of Uralsk in north-west­ern Kaza­kh­stan. As it later turned out, this des­tin­a­tion was purely the­or­et­ical, because in fact we bypassed Uralsk and went to Uzbek­istan. The set­tle­ment com­mand­ant urged the Poles to stay in their place of exile as free people and go on work­ing for the One­g­ales enter­prise. It was clear that the loss of the cheap labour provided by the Polish exiles could ser­i­ously dis­rupt the enter­prise's pro­duc­tion plans, and as a result industry would not receive enough of an import­ant raw mater­ial, timber. It turned out, how­ever, that none of the Poles wanted to stay, not even such a toady and informer as Chajan. For Chajan the good times were over: we had been freed from the power of the NKVD, and had he stayed in the taiga he would have had to do heavy lum­ber­jack­ing to earn his living. So he too declared that he wanted to leave with every­one else. After the amnesty my Father wrote to the Dis­trict NKVD Com­mand­ant's Office in Onega asking for the return of his per­sonal files, which had been sent there when he was depor­ted, explain­ing that as an amnestied man he would be able to use them to doc­u­ment his qual­i­fic­a­tions so as to work in his pro­fes­sion. The office in Onega did not reply. We did not know when we would leave, but we real­ised that the jour­ney by goods train would be long and that we had to lay in enough food to sur­vive many weeks of travel. A family of five needs a lot of food. An addi­tional worry was Father's ill­ness: he had been dis­charged from hos­pital uncured and was unable to do any­thing to help pre­pare for the jour­ney.

So most of the work of obtain­ing food fell to Mother and partly to my brother and me. Quite a few Rus­si­ans came to our set­tle­ment inter­ested in buying women's cloth­ing, of which we still had some left to sell. We man­aged to sell a few things and had a few more roubles. Unfor­tu­nately there was noth­ing to buy with the money at Szom­boziero, where the little shop had empty shelves. The nearest vil­lage, Verkhovye, was 15 km away, too far to walk there and carry back food bought from the locals. We decided to use the newly built rail­way, on which goods trains, and some­times pas­sen­ger trains, were already run­ning. Three kilo­metres from Kat­iszcze, by the short cut, was Glazanikha sta­tion, where trains stopped, and the next sta­tion, Tesovka, was eleven kilo­metres fur­ther on towards the town of Onega. We decided to take the train to Tesovka in the hope of doing some good trade. I made two or three trips to Tesovka with Mother. We took a few things with us to sell and barter.

To get to Tesovka we first had to walk two kilo­metres through the taiga from Kat­iszcze to the rail­way line. On the way we passed a little cot­tage where a Rus­sian named Chortov lived alone. Nobody knew what Chortov lived on or how he man­aged in winter, but people said he hunted and was also a sort of forest warden and had the means to sup­port him­self. When we reached the rail­way we still had to walk about a kilo­metre along the track to Glazanikha sta­tion, where we had to wait many hours for a goods train to appear. When one came in the late after­noon and stopped, we jumped into one of the wagons without asking anyone's per­mis­sion. We rode this train to Tesovka, a small set­tle­ment of a few houses where people work­ing on the rail­way lived. One of the locals advised us to walk along the lake to a set­tle­ment a few kilo­metres away, where we would be able to buy things. We set off in the dir­ec­tion shown, but it began to grow dark, so we turned back to the sta­tion. There we called at one of the houses, where we were received by a kind Rus­sian woman, a rail­way­man's wife, who gave us tea, took an interest in our goods, and we did some bar­ter­ing. In exchange for women's blouses we received flour, groats, oil and per­haps some­thing else. Most import­ant of all, she let us stay the night; true, we slept on the bare floor, but we were happy not to have to spend the night out­side look­ing at the stars.

The second trip was even more suc­cess­ful in terms of trade, but on the way back we reached our sta­tion, Glazanikha, in the even­ing, when it was already dark. We decided to walk through the taiga by night and try to cover the two kilo­metres from the rail­way to Kat­iszcze in the dark. Unfor­tu­nately, when we reached the path from the rail­way to our set­tle­ment, it turned out that in such dark­ness we had no chance of get­ting there and would have to sit under a tree and wait for morn­ing. But my brother had an idea how to beat the dark­ness. He sug­ges­ted trying to light the path, and the best thing for that was birch bark, of which there was plenty, and we had matches with us. We stripped a lot of white bark from sev­eral birch trees, lit one piece, and found that the bark burnt very well and gave enough light to see a couple of metres of path ahead. Walk­ing slowly, we reached our hut safely.

At the begin­ning of Octo­ber 1941 we were informed by the com­mand­ant's office that in the next few days the inhab­it­ants of our two set­tle­ments would leave from Glazanikha sta­tion for the south of the Soviet Union and that we should pre­pare for the jour­ney. Finally we received notice to go to Glazanikha with our belong­ings, where a spe­cial train would be provided. From Kat­iszcze to Glazanikha, by the road through Szom­boziero, was five kilo­metres, but because Father was ser­i­ously ill, and Mother, although she had recovered her health, was not fit to carry heavy loads, the job of car­ry­ing our belong­ings to the train fell to my brother Zbyszek and me. We had to carry it all on our own backs, and there was a lot of it, because besides our per­sonal belong­ings there was a great deal of food pre­pared for the jour­ney. I had turned thir­teen on 6 Octo­ber, but I was small and under­nour­ished, with many unhealed sores on my body, and car­ry­ing our pos­ses­sions was beyond my strength. To this day I remem­ber how exhausted we were by all that car­ry­ing. My brother and I made two trips and got our things to the sta­tion. All the people wait­ing for the train tried to squeeze into the small sta­tion build­ing. But the train had not yet come, and we camped at the sta­tion all night; there were about four hun­dred of us. Among those wait­ing was a dying woman lying on the sta­tion floor, and one could see life ebbing out of her. At last, the next day, 13 Octo­ber 1941, fif­teen goods wagons were brought. About 420 of us were leav­ing. Each wagon had to hold on aver­age about 27 people. These wagons were adap­ted for car­ry­ing people, having two small win­dows with slid­ing panes, two-tier bunks and an iron stove in the middle. The Sovi­ets had a large stock of such wagons left over from the four deport­a­tions of Poles in 1940 and 1941.

On 13 Octo­ber 1941 we said good­bye to the taiga, leav­ing behind the whole weight of the wor­ries and mis­for­tunes that had befallen us in the 20 months since the day of our deport­a­tion; at last we had hope that our lot would improve, though it was only a hope.

To con­clude my account of our stay in the Arkhangelsk Oblast, I would like to try to estab­lish what became of the total of 1,818 people depor­ted in one trans­port from Wołkow­ysk. Of these, about 500 went to Szom­boziero and Kat­iszcze, while a second group of over 600 of our com­pat­ri­ots, who trav­elled with us to Kodino sta­tion and then to the vil­lage of Verkhovye, was sent to Tushilovo, a place deep in the taiga on a lake called Kozhozero, 135 km south of the town of Onega. At Tushilovo, as we did at Szom­boziero, they occu­pied huts left by Ukrain­ian trud­poselen­tsy. But a large group of Ukrain­i­ans remained near the Poles, living in their huts on the other side of the lake. The amnesty of August 1941 seems not to have fully reached the Poles at Tushilovo, as shown by the fact that almost all of them declared that after the amnesty they wished to stay where they were and did not ask to go to the south of the USSR¹⁰.

A third group of people trav­el­ling in the esh­elon from Wołkow­ysk prob­ably went to two set­tle­ments, Malye Izby and Vol­ch­an­itsa. These were people who in Feb­ru­ary 1940 did not travel with us to the last sta­tion at Kodino but were detached from our esh­elon earlier and sent to those set­tle­ments.