The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 3 - Exile in the USSR
The treatment of the Poles by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 is still an unfamiliar story to many people. At the time, news of what was going on barely reached the west, and later in the war, when Britain and the United States became allies of the USSR, discussion of the episode was discouraged as tactless. Ascherson (1987, p.94) has observed that the true story only emerged in fragments in the post-war years, and has been 'overshadowed by the more spectacular and better-publicised savageries of the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rest of Europe'. Yet, it was no less brutal or cold blooded. As Anne Applebaum (1994, p.14) observed in an article in the Age:
Almost no one in the west considers (Stalin's) crimes to have been evil in the same visceral way that they feel Hitler's crimes to have been evil. Until recently, many argued that there was no way to commemorate Stalin's victims, because there was no proof of their identity or their numbers. This was always a somewhat disingenuous argument - witnesses and written memoirs abound.
Even if there is still a lack of interest in Stalin's victims there is much to be learned from those who survived their unwilling encouners with the regime, both for the knowledge of oppressive regimes which their stories offer and for an understanding of the sheer magnitude of human endurance in the face of war.
In particular, the strength of the women stands out. Faced with the forced removal of husbands, fathers and brothers, often without the opportunity to offer a farewell and fearing the worst for their future, they showed great courage. The loneliness, the seemingly impossible task of feeding and protecting their children, the desperation in losing contact with husbands and families, and the physical endurance needed to carry out work for which they were ill equipped are all things most of us can barely imagine. The children too were forced to take on tasks and responsibilities far beyond their years. That so many survived the brutal journeys which were ahead of them is a true testament of their faith and strength.
The Journeys to the USSR
The cattle trucks into which the Polish deportees were loaded were headed for different destinations thousands of kilometres away in the depths of the Soviet Union. The distances covered in the course of these transportations can be hard to visualise, even when they are plotted on a map of the former Soviet Union. All of the transportations took their human cargo to various kolhoz, or collective farms, west of the Ural Mountains into the forest, north into the Arkhangel'sk district, into the tundra and marshlands of Siberia and south west to Kazakhstan and Kirghistan on the steppes of Central Asia. Lucjan Królikowski, a young Polish seminarian who was transported to Arkhangel'sk, maintains that by deporting and dispersing the Poles over these vast territories, the intention of the Soviet government was 'to accelerate their assimilation into the local element and thereby make it impossible for them to organise' (Królikowski, 1983, pp. 16-17).
None of the deportees were informed of their destination beforehand or told how long they might expect to be cooped up on the journey. Bogdan Harbuz remembered how his family were driven to the station:
We could see thousands and thousands of other people in the same predicament. We were all loaded on to cattle trucks, which were then closed before the transport started off for Russia. At the same time hundreds of other transports from the different parts of Poland under Russian domination started towards the same destination - Siberia. Some people got there in a week or two weeks but our transport went at a very slow pace: the trip took approximately five to six weeks. In all that time we were given no food and very little water and, because of that, quite a few people died. At the sidings we saw heaps of bodies from the previous transports lying piled up under the snow.
Królikowski (1983, p. 17) summarised the situation, 'Hunger, disease, dirt and exhaustion decimated the exiles along the way. Most of the victims were among the weakest, the elderly, but little children also died en masse …' during these lengthy journeys. Several people described how deportees in the cattle trucks tried to bolster up their spirits as they left their beloved homeland. For example, Jerzy Mazak recounted the chaos at the station as crowds milled around outside:
there were people coming and going, noise and crying as families were separated. Then, a significant thing happened when the doors were shut. People started praying and singing hymns. That went on for the whole trip. We stopped for other wagons to join. It took seventeen days to reach Kazakhstan. During the trip people were sick and it was cold. When we made stops there was boiling water to make some tea and people were delegated to go out for provisions, bread and soup. We had very little food. At times we would pull up alongside another train which held prisoners of war and people would call out to find out who was on the train. People were looking for their loved ones. They were dramatic scenes. Being a child, I wouldn't have had the full understanding.
In a similar vein, Urszula Paszkowska recalled that when their train stopped in Lwów, they were greeted by an 'amazing sight'. The station was:
covered with a multitude of people, mainly youngsters, who had heard about the deportation. Many of the young Polish boys sneered at the convoys of Russian soldiers. The soldiers looked helpless because even if they had started shooting, they couldn't have shot the thousands of people who were there. We were given our first meal there, a bucket of hot soup, and then we proceeded eastwards. As our train started rolling, the whole carriage started singing religious songs. When we reached the border, the difference between the two areas was massive. In Poland the fields were small. The countryside looked like a chess board. When we crossed the border it was just vast areas of dark soil. In some parts there were beetroots or other crops still not collected from the previous year. The Polish countryside looked somehow cheerful where the Russian one was very depressing.
Memories of the train journey to the Soviet Union remain strongly etched in the minds of most people, unless they were very young or became sick on the journey east. Elizabeth Patro, reflecting upon a young child's memory of the journey east, has 'vague recollections of dark overcrowded wagons, pangs of hunger, the thirst and the stench, long endless journeys, pine forests, freezing cold, snow, snow, snow, then the strange country of Russia, its language, its people'. In a similar vein, Zenon Zebrowksi, who was barely 4 years old at the time his family were deported in 1941, describes his memories of these years as 'underexposed snapshots, dark, with not too much detail. There is no continuity. For instance, going to Russia I remember seeing the forests from the train, going through mountains and tunnels. There was no sign of habitation'.
The conditions of travel were uniformly abysmal, made worse by the length of time people were shut in the trains as they traversed huge distances across the Soviet Union. The time people spent locked in the confined, unhygienic trains varied according to their destination. In all reported cases, each cattle truck was loaded with fifty to sixty people, indiscriminately packed together in trucks lined with planks on which they sat and slept throughout the journey. In some transports there were complete families but for the most part the transports consisted predominantly of women and children. Generally, there were only small ventilation slots to serve as windows, and the carriages were frequently scaled until the train passed the border into the Soviet Union. Some cattle trucks contained a small stove, although fuel was scarce. A hole in the floor served as a latrine. When they were available, blankets or sheets were placed around the hole in an effort to maintain a degree of privacy, but this was not always possible.
It took us two weeks to reach our destination, Arkhangel'sk. I remember when they first opened the cattle truck and the guards said we could relieve ourselves, men women and children all together, squatting by the train. There was no shelter so it was very embarrassing but towards the end of the journey no one was paying any attention any more. It had to be accepted as it was. (Kazimierz Sosnowski)
The supply of food varied from transport to transport. Where the deportees were fortunate enough to be given food by the Russian authorities, it generally consisted of buckets of watery soup or the occasional cabbage pie. In many instances, no food or water was supplied and the deportees had to rely on whatever they had been able to pack in the brief hours before being taken from their homes.
They opened the doors perhaps twice, to give us a couple of buckets of drinking water and what they called a fish soup which was in fact boiled water with sliced onions and herring heads floating in it. We were really dependent on the food which we managed to take for that journey. That was it. (Tadeusz Dobrostanski)
Irena Makowiecka, who was deported in April 1940 with her mother and three siblings, recounts:
There were only women and children, very few men, because we were in a transport of families of the men who had already been arrested. We stopped at stations and were given hot water. Somebody had some beautiful, huge white onions and they tasted wonderful. This was luxury. I didn't realise how tasty onions can be until we went on the train! I don't remember that much from the travelling. You switch off and wait when you are frightened and when bad things happen to you; you just try to survive the best you can.
The final wave of transports left Poland just before war was declared between Germany and Russia in June 1941. Wladyslawa Smenda, who was deported with her 10-year-old son Janusz and 6-year-old daughter Teresa in May 1941, described how they were shut in the cattle wagons for nearly three weeks:
We slept on the bare boards. We were lucky because we had been allowed to pack a few things, so we had coats to lie on. Some people had nothing. There were only tiny windows and once a day they opened the doors and gave us soup and water. I never ate any. I was so numb that the people in the train were afraid I was going mad. They always put me by the window so I could look out. I didn't look out for my children but the other people gave them something to eat. Then, when we were north of Krasnoyarsk, by the Yenisei River, the war between the Germans and Russians started and the train was needed for the army. We were unloaded and put in a field surrounded by soldiers. We were women and children. No men. It was awful but I was better when they put me out from the train. I started to think then.
Also in the last wave of transports from Poland were the Zebrowski family.
We were taken away on the evening of 20th June 1941 and the war broke out on the 22nd. When we were in Minsk, on the Russian side of the border, the last two trucks on our train were bombed so we were very quickly whisked away from there. We didn't stop for a long time. It was very hot. There was a lack of water but my mother had baskets of eggs and we drank those raw eggs to help our thirst. I don't know how long we had been travelling for, but our bread was already mouldy. One night, we stopped at a station and Mother took one loaf of this mouldy bread and threw it from our truck. There was a woman in a beautiful coat and she grabbed it. You should have seen her face. It was covered with that mould but she was eating with such a hunger. My mother cried and said, 'Is that what my children are going to?' She didn't throw any more bread away. (Teresa Sosnowska nèe Zebrowska)