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Memoirs of Kazimierz Bachmiński
  1. Introduction
  2. Chapter I: My Family and My Town
  3. Chapter II: Deportation
  4. Chapter III: Amnesty
  5. Chapter IV: The Journey to Kazakhstan
  6. Chapter V: In Dzhambul
  7. Chapter VI: In Iran
  8. Epilogue

Introduction

On the sources and origins of the memoir

About 1 min read Read this part in the PDF (from p. 6, in Polish)

Map of the route: Wołkowysk, Kodino, Szomboziero, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Dzhambul, Krasnovodsk, Pahlavi, Tehran, Isfahan.
Map of the route: Wołkowysk, Kodino, Szomboziero, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Dzhambul, Krasnovodsk, Pahlavi, Tehran, Isfahan. p. 5 in the PDF

From 1936 until the out­break of the war I lived with my family in Wołkow­ysk, a county town in the Białys­tok Voivode­ship. On 19 Septem­ber 1939 Wołkow­ysk came under Soviet occu­pa­tion. On 10 Feb­ru­ary 1940 my family was depor­ted by the Soviet author­it­ies to the Arkhangelsk Oblast, near the White Sea. I wrote the first ver­sion of these Mem­oirs in 2015. This second edi­tion, some­what expan­ded and cor­rec­ted, was edited between 2019 and 2021.

The stat­ist­ics and other inform­a­tion on the deport­a­tions quoted here come largely from volume XIV of the Index of the Repressed series pub­lished by the Insti­tute of National Remem­brance, edited by Ewa Rybarska: Depor­tow­ani w obwodzie archan­giel­skim, część 1. Alfa­betyczny wykaz 9320 oby­wa­teli pol­skich wywiezio­nych w roku 1940 z obwodu białostockiego (Deportees in the Arkhangelsk Oblast, part 1: An alpha­bet­ical list of 9,320 Polish cit­izens depor­ted in 1940 from the Białys­tok region). The list con­tains 85 names of people depor­ted to the set­tle­ment of Szom­boziero, the place of our exile, and page 103 gives the details of the mem­bers of my family. It also includes inform­a­tion on sev­eral people arres­ted at the place of our exile and on those sen­tenced by the courts for activ­ity against the Soviet author­it­ies. I also used the Insti­tute of National Remem­brance study Deportacje oby­wa­teli pol­skich z Zachod­niej Ukrainy i Zachod­niej Białor­usi w 1940 roku (Deport­a­tions of Polish Cit­izens from West­ern Ukraine and West­ern Belarus in 1940).

Walerian Wyso­cki, who was depor­ted by the Soviet author­it­ies on 10 Feb­ru­ary 1940 in the same trans­port from Wołkow­ysk to Szom­boziero and who was our com­pan­ion in exile, described his exper­i­ences in a ret­ro­spect­ive pub­lished as a typescript under the title Wspom­ni­enia z lat 1940–1944. W tajdze i na stepach (Mem­oirs of 1940–1944: In the Taiga and on the Steppes). While writ­ing my Mem­oirs I was able to com­pare what I remembered with what Walerian Wyso­cki had writ­ten.