The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 3 - Exile in the USSR (continued)
Life in the USSR
The Polish exiles' experiences in the Soviet Union are difficult to encapsulate. All participants in this project had strong recollections of this time in their lives, and each account ranged across a diversity of themes, all pertinent to an understanding of survival. Together, their stories highlight the complex nature of human endurance in the face of extreme physical and psychological hardship.
Polish deportees were sent to a range of geographical locations for varying lengths of time, dependent upon the date of their arrest and deportation. Once in the Soviet Union, their immediate fate was largely determined by the people who controlled the local kolhozes.
Some adults, labelled as wrieditieli or 'undesirables', were left to their own devices, with no opportunity to work for food provisions. Others were forced into a variety of labouring jobs such as tree felling and wood cutting, digging holes, snow clearing, brick making, milking, shovelling grain, and cooking. Access to both accommodation and food varied from kolhoz to kolhoz, as did relations with the Soviet authorities and local inhabitants. Some families were able to establish limited contact with relatives back in Poland and were assisted by periodic parcels of food or money, others had to rely solely on the possessions they had been able to take with them. As many deportees had been given little time to pack, their ability to supplement meagre rations through the sale or exchange of personal possessions varied greatly.
Polish children deported to USSR after 1941
(Courtesy of Tadeusz Dobrostanski)
In some communities children were forced to attend Soviet schools, while in others they were left to their own devices. Occasionally children found paid work to help the survival of their diminished family units, in other families the eldest children aided family survival by undertaking the care of younger siblings, and by 'hunting and foraging' for additional sources of food and fuel.
All Polish exiles had to endure an attack upon their religious and political ideologies. As Roman Catholics forced to live under a communist regime they were subject to various degrees of religious persecution, as well as an enforced acceptance of a communal work ethic which allowed no room for the strong sense of individuality so cherished by Poles.
Perhaps the most effective way to illustrate both the diversity and the common experiences of deportation is to allow participants to speak for themselves. These edited excerpts give some indication of the conditions which had to be survived and the ways in which individuals managed in the face of adversity. For ease, they have been sorted into three sections, the first covering experiences of exile in Siberia, the second detailing experiences in Kazakhstan and the third covering other experiences of deportation. The stories are presented in order of age of the participant at the start of exile.