The Journey to Kazakhstan

We left Glazanikha as soon as load­ing was fin­ished. Winter had not yet come, but on the day we left the first snow began to fall. We headed south-east and via Kodino reached Obozer­sky, and from there on the Arkhangelsk–Moscow line we reached Volo­gda, a large junc­tion. From Volo­gda we went east towards the Ural Moun­tains, and after many days of travel we reached Sverd­lovsk (Yeka­ter­in­burg), a large city beyond the Urals, and from there Chelyab­insk. Our goods train ran out­side any timetable, often stand­ing for a long time in sid­ings to let other, more import­ant trans­ports pass. This line was far from the front, German air­craft did not reach it, so there were no air raids and we trav­elled quite safely. At that time the Soviet author­it­ies were evac­u­at­ing many factor­ies beyond the Urals from areas threatened by German occu­pa­tion, and much of that evac­u­ation went along the very line on which we were now trav­el­ling.

The jour­ney was uncer­tain all the time. One never knew when the train would stop or start again, which made it hard to buy food, and there was also the fear of not get­ting back on board before the train left. The rep­res­ent­at­ives of our group of amnestied Poles trav­el­ling to Uralsk had a cer­ti­fic­ate entitling us to a bread ration at the larger sta­tions. I remem­ber that the first bread we man­aged to buy col­lect­ively for the whole trans­port was only after two weeks of travel, in Sverd­lovsk (Yeka­ter­in­burg), where we had a longer stop. Every­one fell on that bread, and they must have been very hungry, because one could see almost every­one chok­ing on it, eating too fast. I remem­ber the next large sta­tion, Chelyab­insk, well, because my brother and I went into the city centre. There were wide streets and apart­ment blocks sev­eral storeys high, but there was noth­ing in the shops. We did, how­ever, manage to buy some­thing of great trad­ing value: matches, of which we bought sev­eral dozen boxes. Later in the jour­ney matches were a valu­able item of barter. Some of our Poles bought live anim­als during the jour­ney, such as calves or sheep, and slaughtered them on the siding where the train stood, dressed the car­casses, and so had a good meal. But these were people who had been farm­ers and stock­breed­ers before the deport­a­tion and could now use their skills in slaughter­ing. At every sta­tion of any size there was a tap marked kipya­tok, boil­ing water, where every­one could draw hot water free of charge. Thanks to our stores of flour and groats we did not go hungry on the jour­ney, but it was hard to buy eggs, butter, meat, pota­toes or veget­ables where the train stopped. A few bottles of oil obtained before we left helped a little, but not for long.

Nobody noticed when, bypassing Uralsk, the sup­posed des­tin­a­tion of our jour­ney, we found ourselves in Kaza­kh­stan, and head­ing south-east we approached the Aral Sea, and then, trav­el­ling fur­ther south, we found ourselves in Uzbek­istan and reached Tashkent, the cap­ital of that repub­lic. It was already Novem­ber, but it was quite warm here. At small sta­tions the locals sold fruit and veget­ables and even rais­ins, kish­mish. It was a region with a warm cli­mate, where grapes, water­mel­ons and cotton were grown.

From Tashkent our train turned south-west and we reached Samarkand, a large city with many ori­ental monu­ments and a long his­tory going back to antiquity. At that time none of us was inter­ested in sight­see­ing, and when the train stopped at the goods sta­tion in Samarkand, our people scattered towards the town to buy some­thing. My brother Zbyszek and I also ran towards the rail­way sta­tion to buy some­thing to eat. We man­aged to do our shop­ping, but when we came back to where our train had been stand­ing, the train was gone. We searched the whole sta­tion, but it was not there, and a rail­way­man told us that a goods train car­ry­ing people had left for Bukhara. We decided to catch up with it by taking the first pas­sen­ger train to Bukhara, without a ticket, of course. Even­ing was approach­ing and it was get­ting cold, and we had no warm clothes on and faced a night jour­ney. But our greatest worry was whether we would be able to find the train at all, since it had no dis­tin­guish­ing marks and no fixed des­tin­a­tion. Soon a pas­sen­ger train bound for Bukhara pulled into the sta­tion. We got into one of the car­riages, but before the train moved off, a con­ductor appeared and roughly threw us out, shut­ting the door. We stayed out­side, work­ing out what to do next. When the train star­ted, we jumped onto the car­riage steps and settled ourselves there. And so our night jour­ney began. It became very cold (it must be remembered that it was already the last ten days of Novem­ber) and the wind froze us even more as we trav­elled. The train seldom stopped, as it was an express, but when it stopped at larger sta­tions we jumped off the steps so as not to fall into the con­ductor's hands, and when the train moved off we were back on the steps again. After three hun­dred kilo­metres we reached Bukhara at dawn. Unfor­tu­nately our train was not there. Luck­ily, after a few hours we man­aged to find it at the goods sta­tion: evid­ently it had trav­elled more slowly than our pas­sen­ger train and fallen behind. It was a great stroke of luck that we found each other. Had we not, we would have been com­pletely lost, sep­ar­ated from our family with no chance of ever find­ing them again. We did not know the name of the place our trans­port was head­ing for. At that time more than a hun­dred thou­sand Polish cit­izens released from spe­cial set­tle­ments and labour camps had arrived in Uzbek­istan, and they were being sent to kolk­hozes and factor­ies as labour.

From Bukhara our trans­port was sent to the town of Karshi in south-east­ern Uzbek­istan. Here we were unloaded. All our pas­sen­gers, with their bundles, were dir­ec­ted to a small park by the sta­tion, where we were to wait for fur­ther decisions about our des­tin­a­tion. It was already the end of Novem­ber; we had been trav­el­ling for a month and a half. In all that time we had not had a single bath, and the lice were a great tor­ment. After a few days camp­ing in the park, word came that there was a new esh­elon at the sta­tion and we were to board it. As I later learnt, the State Defence Com­mit­tee of the USSR had decided that the sur­plus of Poles who had arrived in Uzbek­istan should be moved back to Kaza­kh­stan. Our group, which had come in its entirety from the Onega region, was included in this trans­fer to Kaza­kh­stan. We set off back the same way, through Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent to Arys, and from there through Shymkent east­wards towards Dzh­am­bul. On the way indi­vidual wagons were uncoupled and the people in them were sent to kolk­hozes selec­ted to receive Poles.

Our train jour­ney lasted three days and nights, and one night, when the train stopped for a longer time at some small sta­tion, the com­mand came: Unload! After unload­ing at the small sta­tion we were put onto ladder-sided carts drawn by oxen and set off through the dark night towards some unknown des­tin­a­tion. The Kazakh driv­ing the cart often shouted at the oxen “tsop, tsobe”, and the oxen knew this was an order to turn right or left, like our Polish “hejta, wiśta”. After a few hours we reached a Kazakh vil­lage. It was dark night; we got down from the cart and car­ried our belong­ings into a larger room, a sort of vil­lage hall. This was the end of our jour­ney from the White Sea to Kaza­kh­stan. It had lasted from 13 Octo­ber to 1 Decem­ber, seven weeks, and in that time we had trav­elled six and a half thou­sand kilo­metres.

When day came, someone from the kolk­hoz author­it­ies appeared in our hall and began alloc­at­ing the Polish fam­il­ies to Kazakh house­holds with whom they were to live. The Kaza­khs in this vil­lage lived in detached houses called kib­it­kas, with flat roofs, con­sist­ing of a single room and built of unfired brick. We were placed with a house­hold living in a room with a floor of beaten clay; against the wall was a brick stove with a large cast-iron cauldron, shaped like a great bowl, set into it. Everything was cooked in this cauldron, soup and water for tea alike. There was no table or chairs in the room, only mats for sit­ting and sleep­ing. To the right of the entrance to our hosts' room there was an annexe, a sort of large win­dow­less shed with a clay floor, pre­sum­ably used to store the crops from the fields, and this shed was assigned to us as our home. It was already the begin­ning of Decem­ber and winter was begin­ning to bite. We had no stove or fur­niture in our shed, so all we could do was lie on straw thrown on the clay floor, with no way of cook­ing any­thing. Our Kazakh land­lady was very dis­trust­ful of us, but a few times she let us boil water in her great cauldron, though we had to pay for it each time with a box of matches, the matches Zbyszek and I had bought in Chelyab­insk. The stove was fuelled with so-called kizyak, cow dung dried in the sun. The kolk­hoz lay on the steppe, where there were no trees, so this was the only fuel avail­able. In the grow­ing season the kolk­hoz fields were irrig­ated with water dis­trib­uted through aryks, ditches that brought water from a nearby river. Near the kolk­hoz there was quite a high hill, which I climbed on our very first day out of curi­os­ity to see what the sur­round­ings looked like. Look­ing round, I saw that the kolk­hoz lay not far from a large town. The town was Dzh­am­bul, 11 kilo­metres away.

Mother knew she had to act if we were to sur­vive the coming winter, and first of all she had to save Father, who was ser­i­ously ill. Uncured during his stay in hos­pital at Chekuyevo in August, he had grown stead­ily worse during the seven-week jour­ney in the wagon, which he had no strength to leave when the train stopped; he just lay on the dark lower bunk. He began cough­ing up blood, and the swell­ing in his legs crept ever higher. On top of that came the extremely harsh con­di­tions of life in the kolk­hoz. Mother went to the predsed­a­tel' (chair­man) of the kolk­hoz, explained her hus­band's state of health and declared that she must get a doctor's help. The chair­man agreed to help and gave Mother an ox cart and a driver to take Father to a doctor in Dzh­am­bul. Mother went with Father to Dzh­am­bul and took me with her too, while Zbyszek and Hania, both with colds, stayed behind alone in the cold shed. In the town we found a clinic, where Father was imme­di­ately admit­ted for hos­pital treat­ment. Father was also given trans­port straight away, a horse-drawn cart that was to take him to the hos­pital. He got onto the cart, said good­bye to us, gave us the hos­pital's address, Soyuz Kash­chi Street, and was quickly driven away. Mother and I walked back to our kolk­hoz that same day. In the fol­low­ing days Mother set about selling the few things we still had left, as we were run­ning short of roubles. She got a good price for a navy-blue coat, a lyceum pupil's uni­form coat with red piping on the collar and sleeves, which a Kazakh woman bought for her almost grown-up daugh­ter. All the Kaza­khs present at the sale admired how beau­ti­ful the young girl with long plaits looked in the coat. It is worth men­tion­ing that in Septem­ber 1939, just before the Soviet army entered Wołkow­ysk, my par­ents, want­ing to spend their złoty, which might become worth­less at any moment, had bought two such navy-blue uni­form coats: one for the gym­nas­ium, with blue piping, which I wore at Kat­iszcze in winter, and the other for the lyceum, which had never been worn and was now sold here in the kolk­hoz. Around our aul (vil­lage) stretched the steppe, the kolk­hoz's farm­land, but now, in Decem­ber, the fields were empty. Near our hut I often came across a donkey wan­der­ing loose. One day I tried to get on it and ride it, but it ended badly for me, because the donkey bucked vig­or­ously and threw me off its back.

The Poles who ended up in kolk­hozes had no work in winter, and the kolk­hoz author­it­ies had neither the grounds nor the wish to feed them, so their lot was in prac­tice worse than in the taiga, where there had at least been work and some min­imal income. In the author­it­ies' inten­tions, the amnestied Poles moved from the north­ern and east­ern ter­rit­or­ies of the Soviet Union to Uzbek­istan and Kaza­kh­stan were to go on provid­ing cheap labour, which was becom­ing scarce because of the losses at the front and the call-up of new age groups. The stand­ard of living in the kolk­hozes was very low, because pro­ductiv­ity was low too and com­puls­ory deliv­er­ies to the State had to be met, so the Poles who found them­selves there suffered hunger and their death rate was very high. Winter set in prop­erly in our kolk­hoz: snow fell and it became very cold, and we had no stove in our mud hut. We were in a rather warm cli­mate zone, but it was a con­tin­ental cli­mate with fairly harsh win­ters. Mother decided that we must visit Father in hos­pital, and des­pite the winter weather she set out for Dzh­am­bul with me on 22 Decem­ber 1941. We went on foot, and when we reached the centre we found the hos­pital. In the hos­pital office, when Mother asked which ward the patient Bach­miński was in, she was told that there was no such patient any more, as he had died on 14 Decem­ber. When Mother asked where he had been buried, she was told that he had been buried in a common grave in which ten people had been laid to rest. We could not even visit the grave, because nobody could say where it was; it was some­where out­side the hos­pital grounds, prob­ably in some town cemetery. We were utterly crushed by this tragic and unex­pec­ted news. There was noth­ing left for us but to return to our aul, where Zbyszek and Hania had stayed behind in the unheated shed without hot food, and we had to save ourselves from fur­ther mis­for­tunes. But we did not manage to get back that day, and all night we went round vari­ous eating houses where it was warm and fed ourselves on what had been left uneaten on the plates. The next day we set off back to break the sad news to Zbyszek and Hania. Father died aged 49. His death must be laid at the door of the crim­inal Bolshevik system, which sought to exterm­in­ate Poles: some with a shot in the back of the head, others through a system of forced labour that des­troyed their health and their lives.