Lance Corporal Engineer Jan Maroszek, born 1906, factory worker, married.
On 24 September 1939, near Kowel [now Kovel, Ukraine], I was captured along with various units. After [spending] three days there, [I was] transported to Brody [now in Ukraine] and placed in the local military barracks. The conditions of my stay were very terrible and unhygienic; all I was fed was buckwheat groats with no salt. This continued until 27 October, [when we were then] taken by car to Sasów [now Sasiv, Ukraine], and there, three hundred of us, we began our camp life of slavery.
The first day of forced labor was 1 November, All Saints’ Day. I was rushed [to work], escorted by the NKVD, bitter at heart and filled with memories of our fallen brothers-in-arms. You had to walk over six kilometers to work, to the mine or quarries. And this kind of work continued all winter, with very poor food and no sleeping blankets. The hard, triple-decker bunks were swarming with lice and full of dirt. This continued for some time, but later disinfections gradually started. In April, escorted by a convoy armed with machine guns, we [were] marched in close-order column to Podhorce [now Pidhirtsi, Ukraine], to the stables of one of the landed estates, in order to do road construction. The work [was] subject to so-called quotas, which were impossible to meet, and this meant that you couldn’t get sufficient food and pay. And it was like that in various workplaces. I worked in Sądowa Wiśnia [now Sudova Vyshnia, Ukraine] and in Czerlany [now Cherlany, Ukraine] – doing airfield construction this time – 12 hours a day, very hard and arduous work mixing concrete, [listening] to the sounds of concertina music during lunch break and with various propaganda speeches to listen to. Because the German–Soviet War broke out, I was taken away from the Czerlany camp, marched for seven days to Volochysk [now in Ukraine], and put on a freight train. With the doors and windows closed tightly, with no air, water, or food, I was transported to Starobelsk [now Starobilsk, Ukraine]. Completely worn out, [I was] enlisted in the army at Starobelsk in September 1941.
14 March 1943