The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 2 - Deportation (continued)
Kazimierz Sosnowski was 11 years old, but still remembers the episodes leading to deportation clearly:
In January 1940 the NKVD arrested my father three times for interrogation. The first time they released him after a few hours. The second time he was with them half a day, and the third time they kept him for a day and a half. When he came home he said he was not going back to them because they were trying to make him an informer. He took some clothes and escaped from Polesie to Warsaw on 15 January 1940.
On 10 February the NKVD came at around midnight with rifles to wake us up. They put all four of us against the wall and started searching the house for documents, arms, ammunition, anything. I remember looking down the barrel of the rifle wondering when the bullet would come out. When they finished searching, the house was in a shambles. Everything was upside down and all over the floor. They told us to dress and took us to a certain place for interrogation. There was no interrogation. They took us to a place where they were grouping people before taking them to the train. Everybody else had clothes and food. We didn't have any.
On the way to the station we had to pass our house and the Russian soldiers allowed Mother to go inside and pick up whatever she could. When she got inside, she found that one of the local Byelorussians had put all our hams and bacon on the bed. My mother said, 'These belong to me', but they were too heavy for her to carry. He said, 'Your reign here is over now. These belong to me'. They started arguing but a Russian soldier intervened and told the local to carry those things to the sleigh. Mother packed whatever she could in some bedding but we had no time to prepare ourselves for the harsh winter. We were very unfortunate. We struck bad people.
The second wave of transports, totalling around 160 trains, departed in April 1940 and consisted of an estimated 320 000 people, mostly the families of men who had been arrested because they were members of the intelligentsia or had once been in the Polish military. The Trella family were among this group:
Not long after the Russians arrived in our city the people had to vote to either approve the annexation of eastern Poland - they called it western Ukraine - or for approval of the communist regime. I am not sure which it was. Nobody really had any choice because they would be arrested straight away if they voted incorrectly.
On 10 February 1940, when the first wave of deportation was taking place, we heard that sugar would be available at a particular place so we went there in the middle of the cold winter night to queue. While we were waiting a cart came down the road and one of the women in it yelled, 'Why are you bothering? We are being taken to Russia and you will all be taken too'. That was our first inkling of things to come but we as a family never expected that we would be deported. Still, because of the rumours every night, I would wake up if a lorry went by and listen to see if it was stopping in front of our house.
Then, on 13 April, in the middle of the night I was dreaming that we were being deported and in the dream I heard the knocking on our door. In that instant I woke up and the knocking was real. There were about six people. The man in charge came into the bedroom and read the official communique which said that we were an undesirable element in eastern Poland and we were being transported to the Soviet Union. They never told us what part of Russia they were going to take us to. One of the ordinary soldiers came into the bedroom and stressed that we should take the warm things so my mother had a large wooden chest and she packed practically all our clothes. They gave us only an hour to get ready but as the lorry that was taking us took longer we had time to pack all our clothes and some food. The whole household was going, including my grandparents. My Aunt wasn't there, which was fortunate. She was able to send us food parcels in the first few months of our exile. (Urszula Paszkowska nèe Trella)
Wieslawa Paszkiewicz (nèe Wojtasiewicz) was twelve and a half years old when her father was arrested on 22 February 1940. He was a public servant and they never heard what happened to him. Three weeks later, Wieslawa and her mother Apolonia were deported from Lwów.
On 13 April 1940 many thousands of mothers and children whose fathers had been arrested were taken. We only had half an hour to pack. The soldier who came told us that we would die in Russia but my mother put everything she could in sheets and blankets, packed like a swag. In one night six long trains went on to Russia from Lwów and in every single cattle truck there were fifty or sixty people. I don't know how many thousands went in just one night.
The third block of deportations took place over June and July of 1940 and consisted of some 240 000 people, including families of men who had been arrested and refugees from central and western Poland. For example, Tadeusz Dobrostanski's father, Jozef, was editor-in-chief of a daily newspaper, Kurier Baltycki in Gdynia on the Baltic Sea. Jozef was arrested in June 1940 and subsequently deported to Rybinsk near Vologda. Tadeusz Dobrostanski explained how his father attempted to enhance the safety of his young family against the advancing German army.
My father was a journalist, so he was very aware of the situation. Three days before the war started he sent my mother, brother and myself to our relations in Lwów, in south-eastern Poland. He thought we would be safer there because we were escaping the German blitzkrieg which started close to where we were living. My father joined the army and after the 1939 campaign was over, he survived and joined us in Lwów. When the Russians entered Poland on 17 September they started introducing Russian laws and regulations. The NKVD were very powerful: they knew everything and many people disappeared all of a sudden. One night at about one o'clock they knocked on our door and arrested my father because he was an officer in the Polish army. They gave him a short time and assured my crying mother it was only a short interrogation and that he would be sent home. Of course he wasn't and three or four days later, on a Sunday afternoon, as we returned from church, they came to arrest the three of us.
They gave us very little time to pick up our belongings. We were put on a lorry where there were other unfortunates already waiting. While we were driving to the station strange people, realising that we were deportees, were tossing whatever food they could on that lorry. We all shared that later on, on the train. We were taken to the railway station where they put us into cattle carriages, roughly sixty people in each. It was 26 June 1940 when we started the journey. We knew they were taking us east but that was all.
Finally in May and June 1941, just a short time before Germany attacked the USSR, the NKVD managed to round up another 200 000 families of men arrested after April 1940, as well as many city intelligentsia, railway workers and foresters. While these families had so far been 'saved' from the hardships of life in the outer reaches of the Soviet Union, Wladyslawa Smenda's brief account of life in Soviet occupied Poland speaks for itself:
When the war started in 1939 1 was left to teach but my husband was arrested by the Russians. He was in Stanislawow in prison and during these months I could visit him and give him small parcels and money so he could buy something in the prison. He was tried as an officer in a closed court because he fought in the 1921 war between Poland and Russia and was given the death sentence. The war was about the eastern border. I hired a lawyer who appealed and his sentence was changed to life with hard labour. This was in 1940. I don't know what happened to him but the last money I sent came back. That is all I know. I tried to find out if he was one of the men at Katyn.
A few months later, on 22 May 1941, the NKVD came at night and told us we were to be resettled. They took me and the children to Russia. My son, Janusz, was nearly ten, and Teresa was six. When we were in the cattle wagons, in the train being taken to Krasnoyarsk in Russia, the war between the Germans and Russia started. They broke the alliance between them. The train was needed for the soldiers, so we were unloaded and put in a field surrounded by soldiers. We were women and children. Lots of children. No men. Then we were taken to the station on lorries. It was awful.
Teresa Sosnowska (nèe Zebrowska) was the eldest daughter in a farming family in the Lomza district, east of the Vistula River, at the western point of the Russian invasion.