The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 3 - Exile in the USSR (continued)
Siberia
Stanislawa Jutrzenka-Trzebiatowska (then Adamska) was 33 years old when she and her daughter were deported to Kotlas, north-east of Moscow.
When the train stopped there were people with horses and sleighs who loaded our things and took us to this clearing in a big forest, a little distance from the train stop, where there were big buildings. Someone told us that they were built during the first war by Italian prisoners of war. The buildings were empty and there was a terrible smell of insecticide. Night was falling, nobody was there to look after us, nobody was interested in us. There were about eighty to a hundred of us, including some Jewish people, some teachers like me, just women and children and a few old men. Some people had a little food, some women gave me some bread. During the eight days in the train we had been given some fish, very salty. We had water from the train, but only if you had something to put it in.
We were there for around eighteen months. Gradually we made things a little better. We divided rooms off and built a clay oven. The old men made bread for us, not for sale but to give out. We traded possessions, clothing and shoes for food and milk from the few cows. If you had nothing you could not get milk. I found a goat. In my country only Jewish people drank goat's milk, but in Russia it was good and my daughter became healthy. All this time I was praying to be able to go back to Poland.
Maria Szuster-Nowak was 32 years old when she was deported from the town of Krzemieniec in eastern Poland with her only daughter Mietka and two young cousins. At the age of 86, Maria found it very painful, and at times very confusing, to recount her experience of exile.
I do not remember all the details to tell you now but sometimes when I go to sleep, I shut my eyes and I see all these things. I remember everything and I think, 'How did God give us the strength?' I always prayed to God but there were some times I would say, 'God. If we have to be all the time here, get us to die tomorrow. I don't want to live like this. It is a hard life'.
We travelled for a long time when they took us from Poland, a long way to a new settlement in a place called Ukdom, in the Renski region north of Arkhangel'sk. I had three children with me but I had to go to work so I could buy bread. Every morning I took my husband's trousers and axe and I went to the forest to fell trees. We used to make heaps - they called them -'cubermetres' - a special size stack a metre high and two metres long.
You could buy one kilo of bread if you were a working person and 300 grams for the children. We used to eat just a piece of bread and some soup. The Russian women used to come from the settlement and we used to sell anything valuable, like clothes and pillow cases, that we had managed to take with us from Poland in order to buy other food. They were poor people too, the Russian people. That is how it was for nearly two years.
At the age of fourteen, Zdzislawa Wasylkowska (nèe Rewaj), along with both parents and her 10-year-old sister, Aleksandra, were transported to a camp in the very north of Arkhangel'sk named Zaoazierie, which had been built by Ukrainian deportees in 1936.
We had been told how terrible this place was but being young I didn't pay much attention. When you are young, you think everything will be all right. It was almost night time when we arrived and we were given a small room in the barracks for five or six families. It was a charming, very beautiful country in a way, with snow and trees all around us. My father had to go to work until he was arrested again, along with some other men, towards the end of the year. They never told you why people were arrested, they just said you were the enemy of the people. He was sent to another camp, cutting trees and then transporting them up to Arkhangel'sk during the summer months. We were hysterical when he left and we were not even allowed to say goodbye.
We had a very hard time after Father went because we were persecuted. My mother couldn't get a job at first and there was no money to buy bread. My sister was a little girl at the time: she was so skinny and her stomach was distended with hunger.Then, at the most critical moment, a parcel arrived from my uncle, with some money. It was like a miracle. That is what saved us. My mother eventually got work on the sledges. It was night work and very hard but it paid quite good money. We stayed there until the German-Russian war broke out.
Regina Tabaczynska (nèe Tijewski) was 12 years old when she was deported from Rowne in eastern Poland to Poldnievitzsa settlement in the Siberian forest.
In our barrack, number thirteen, were two big halls, two or three smaller rooms, and one big stove for everybody. In that hall were about a hundred people, families with small children. There were not many men and some women had about four, five or six children until they started dying from typhoid fever and dysentery. We were sleeping next to each other, packed like sardines along big benches around the sides of the rooms. We were on a lower bench. Terrible conditions and terrible bed-bugs. It was lucky for us that we had packed some carpets because we slept under them. Sometimes during the winter when you woke up in the morning everything was stuck to the wall with frost.
Bread was a luxury and we could very seldom get any meat. It was already a starvation diet but not to the point of death. My mother had succeeded in taking some butter, lard and meat from Poland, so we lived on that but a lot of our things were lost during that journey. They were probably stolen but I don't bear any grudge to those women. They had to save their children. In one family there were six children and they were dying. That woman couldn't do a thing. She was deported without being able to take anything and she had to try and survive. I don't think she did. We stayed there for about two years.
Barbara Kaluzynska (nèe Horbaczewska) was 10 years old in 1940 when she was deported to the village of Bohatyrewka in northern Siberia with her mother and younger brother.
We arrived on the 1st of May. I remember the date because it was a very big holiday in Russia. There were six families, with small children and I was one of the oldest. My brother was very ill then and we were just put in a village club and left there. It was a Ukrainian village because in 1936 some people of Polish and Ukrainian descent were taken by the Russians and put there, where they built their own village. They understood our plight and took us into their homes. There was not much we could do there because it was such a small collective farm. They were raising cattle and wheat. There was no work for the women and children. We were just there, living and exchanging things. It was not a bad life really because the people were good to us. Then in July my brother died. I was very upset. We were there for many months although I don't remember how long.
Kazimierz Sosnowski was 11 years old when he was deported with his mother and two elder brothers in February 1940.
We ended up in the district of Arkhangel'sk where it is mostly forest and forestry work cutting timber for building. My-age children had to go to school but there was not enough food and there was no money to buy food. Mother was working, my eldest brothers were working and I was going to school. I was hungry all the time and I left school and found myself some light work. In two years I had about thirty different jobs! I delivered supplies to people in the camps, cleaned bark from the forest floor, stripped bark from the trees, cut hay for horses, raked hay, made clearings for small farms and government paddocks, delivered manure, worked with a surveyor. Anything that was possible I did and sometimes I was earning more money than Mother. I was always getting better money than my eldest brother although I don't know how it happened.
My two friends and I were called 'heroes of work'. That is how my life was there until the war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union became allies with England and through that they became allies with the Polish government in exile. Then we got our freedom and had to travel south.
Halina Juszczyk was deported in February 1940, along with her mother, grandmother, aunt, two sisters and younger brother. She was not quite 9 years old when they arrived in Siberia:
The train took us as far as Vologda, in Siberia. From there we were put on a different train and taken to Vel'sk. From there we were taken on sleighs to a camp on the River Churga. The camp consisted of six barracks and we were allocated a place with some other people, together with my Aunt Helena. My mother had to work in the forest cutting the branches from felled trees. They had to work up to their waist in the snow in winter from six o'clock in the morning until six o'clock at night. Once my mother left home, she changed altogether. Her only aim was to save the children. From being a very timid, quite small, nicely spoken person she became very resilient and resourceful. She wasn't used to hard work because we had servants at home but she found the inner strength that was necessary to struggle for the survival of her family.
We older children had to go to school and the two youngest were supposed to go to the camp kindergarten. My mother's great worry was that the two youngest would be taken away. My oldest sister Krystyna was twelve by then, so she was the one who looked after us and cooked for us and after school she would stand at the door of the kindergarten to make sure that the younger children, Stas and Jadzia, were not taken away. I was the one to gather the wood, to stand in the queue where they gave us soup, but she was the one who had to be responsible for the younger children.