1. Personal data:
Rifleman Izak Goldgewicht, born in 1918, a student, unmarried.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
I was arrested on 21 July 1940 in Horodenka, on the Romanian border.
3. Name of the camp, prison, place of forced labor:
I was detained in the prisons in Horodenka and Stanisławów. In the USSR, I was incarcerated at Romny, Stomel and the Vtoroy Lespromchoz [Second Industrial Forestry Forced Labor Camp] near the city of Szybm in the Komi Republic.
4. Description of the camp, prison:
Cells intended for five to eight people would house between 30 and 50. We slept mainly on the stone floor, in our own torn clothes, contorted like the letter “Z”. Filth, lice, fleas and all that.
In the forced labor camp, the living conditions were somewhat better. We slept in barracks, on plank beds (but we were not given any straw mattresses). The only bedding we had were our own clothes, even more tattered and frayed after our lengthy detention in prison. And we had more space, although it was colder. I would like to stress that the barracks were made of wood, and we lived in them even when the outside temperature fell to minus 60 degrees Celsius. Lice continued to be a problem.
5. Social composition of POWs, prisoners, deportees:
The prisoners were a mix of nationalities – there were even Japanese and Chinese. Prisoners were either “politicals” or guilty of criminal offenses. We Poles didn’t maintain any relations with the Soviet inmates, either political or criminal, for after a long time spent together, “politicals” would resemble ordinary criminals. The Soviet prisoners (criminals) made our lives a misery, especially as they were incited to such behavior by the prison authorities (and by the camp authorities even more).
6. Life in the camp, prison:
a) Life in the prison consisted in waiting for meals, which we received thrice daily. I would like to note that the quantity of food was insufficient. The sole element of variety in our lives – albeit a most unpleasant one – were the interrogations, from which you would invariably return beaten and bruised. Polish prisoners such as myself, accused of illegally crossing the border, would receive wages of five rubles a month, for which we could buy cigarettes (shag tobacco) and – more infrequently, although this depended on the provisioning of the prison shop – bread. Obviously, there was no intellectual nourishment such as books. Our sole entertainment was playing chess, using pieces that we made ourselves (nota bene from bread); the guards would regularly destroy these figures to spite us. The prison in which I was detained for six months was visited twice by a senior NKVD officer, and he actually listened to the complaints made by the inmates. However, I didn’t witness any changes that could have been brought about by these inspections. Conditions in the prison hospital, to which I was admitted when I fell ill with scurvy, were tolerable.
b) Before the Soviet-German war, the working day in the camps lasted 8 hours, while after hostilities broke out it was extended to 10 hours. We toiled mainly in the forests, with the temperature some 30 or 40 degrees below zero, wearing worn donkey jackets and shoes made from old tires. The quotas were impossible to fulfill. As a result, we would receive no more than 300 to 500 grams of bread, and soup twice daily. The conditions were so inhumanely difficult that some colleagues, working with axes or similar tools, would injure themselves on purpose in order to be exempted from work, not caring that they would be disabled for life. Prisoners who carried out the norm received monthly remuneration totaling from three to forty rubles. The only “entertainment” available to us was the cinema, however hardly anyone went, for at the end of the day we were all tired out.
7. Attitude of the authorities, NKVD towards Poles:
Their methods of interrogation simply beggared belief. The NKVD preferred grilling us in the nighttime. It was standard practice for interrogators to use their fists and pistol butts. While in the prison in Stanisławów, I was frequently awoken by the screams of people tortured in the course of “examination sessions”. Some of those returning to their cells were visibly aged.