The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 2 - Deportation (continued)
In 1939 when the war broke out our father was mobilised and was taken with the Polish army to Kozel'sk by the Russians. That was the camp where the officers, judges, and intelligentsia, were killed in Katyn. Only a very few were left. Father escaped by saying that he was not an officer, just a railway worker, so they let him out. A week after he returned home a neighbour told him that he was on the NKVD list so he went away. After that we never had a night's sleep because they were always coming around our buildings, interrogating my mother. Even my little three-year-old brother was questioned. My mother used to take us to her mother's place, quite a long way away, to visit father who was in that area. Only my elder brother and myself were allowed to see him, not my younger siblings, just in case they told the wrong people without understanding. We didn't see my father again after late 1940 or early 1941.
We expected to be deported one day because of our father and because there were a lot of people being deported from our area. We knew what to expect because my cousin's aunt was arrested and we had word from them. We were arrested in June 1941. We children were sleeping in the barn because it was a hot night. My elder brother escaped through a window. We had to go inside where they counted us. One of the Russians who came to arrest us had been billeted with us a few months before and thanks to him we were able to pack many more things than most people. He went through every little nook and told us what to take. We had ham and sausages and shpec4 because my uncle had slaughtered a pig not long before. They kept telling us not to worry, that we were going to join father. That made my mother very worried because she thought that he must have been arrested.
In the morning, they took us to the station where we were surrounded by Russian soldiers. They kept us there while they tried to find my brother and, because of that, my grandmother had time to bake us some bread and bring that to us, with a sack of potatoes. So we had a chance to say goodbye to my grandmother but they didn't find my brother. That evening, on 20th of June 1941, we were taken away. It was just two days before the war started between Germany and the Soviet Union.
These were among the last transports to leave Poland for the Soviet Union, where they joined many of their Polish compatriots as forced labourers in mines and lumber camps near the Arctic Circle, or to be dumped on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Over forty years later Ryszard Pawlowski reflected on the bemusement these events caused him as a child:
We were taken because my father worked for the government and because of his position in the army. He had also fought in the previous war against the Russians. I was only six or seven years old and my brother was younger. I don't see what harm we could have done to them and why they had to deport us but that was their policy. Who knows why it happened. It is really hard to understand why they were deporting children and women. I suppose we were just victims of war.