1. [Personal details:]
Volunteer Maria Matkowska, born in 1924; in Poland, I was a school student.
2. [Date and circumstances of arrest:]
I was deported together with my parents as military settlers on 10 February 1940, escorted by four soldiers.
3. [Name of the camp, prison, or forced labor site:]
The Urals, Molotov Oblast [Region], Kizelovsky Raion [District], Stepanovka settlement no. 15. Unconfined exile [exile to a location other than a forced labor camp]. I did physical labor in the forest. The settlement where our families lived was located 18 kilometers away from the work site.
4. [Description of the camp or prison:]
A hilly area, covered with spruce forest. Five barracks in which the workers lived, plus an office, a medical care unit, a bath, and a shop.
Kerosene light everywhere. Cleanliness was quite perfectly maintained. Once a week the barracks were thoroughly cleaned. There was also a fair amount of bugs, which there was no effective way to get rid of. Every worker had a bed, a paillasse [straw mattress], a sheet, and a blanket.
5. [Composition of prisoners, POWs, and deportees:]
The deportees were Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Poles. Colonists [performed] mainly forestry service. Our mutual relations were exceptionally very good.
6. [Life in the camp or prison:]
At 8:00 AM, everyone was supposed to be at work, regardless of the weather. We were at work for nine hours, one of which was devoted to lunch.
After returning from work, we spent hours standing in a queue (v ocheredi) for bread, and the last ones returned content [only] with the sight and smell of bread, either because it was too late and prodavshchik [the seller, or the person dispensing bread] wanted to go to sleep, or simply because there was no bread left. We rushed to the second ochered’ [queue] to get a bowl of soup, prepared from mushrooms and horse meat.
The summer quota was 12 square meters of spruce timber or 9 [square] meters of birch timber. This was the quota established for two people. One [square] meter cost 12 kopecks. You could even work until midnight, but meeting the quota was essential. The winter quota was smaller, but neither of the quotas were ever met, except in rare cases.
Food: A “Stakhanovite” [highly efficient worker] received a kilogram of bread, a bowl of soup, and millet groats, sometimes with a cockroach.
Also, only “Stakhanovites” were given wadded clothes, because there were very few of those. If there were [any], they were Ukrainians only, and the rest of the workers had to cope on their own.
We usually got on well with one another. We sang Polish national songs, paying no attention to whether they liked it or not.
7. [Attitude of NKVD authorities towards Poles:]
The local authorities tried to extinguish any hope we had of returning to our homeland. But we firmly stuck to our ideas. During work, they peeked at and eavesdropped on us. The most common punishment was proguł, if you were absent from work and had no spravka [certificate] form the vrach [doctor], you were taken to court. After the first trial your wages were reduced by one-fourth for six months. But there was a three strikes rule. If a Polachok [Polack, a derisive expression for a Pole] has been on trial three times, he went behind bars (za reshotku) for four to six months.
Poland was not even mentioned; after all, in their opinion it didn’t exist.
8. [Medical assistance, hospitals, mortality rate:]
Medical assistance… I could write a lot about this. Apart from aspirin, iodine, and mosquito repellent ointment, there were hardly any medicinal products there. With my own eyes I witnessed the death of an acquaintance of mine from one of the settlements, Jan Mazur, a man aged 21. He died of a cold. There were many cases of people dying, mostly children.
9. [What kind of contact, if any, was there with your country and families?]
Mail contact with the family was very weak, letters were intercepted by the local authorities.
10. [When were you released and how did you make it to the army?]
We were released on 25 August 1941. In November I went with my parents to Uzbekistan, where I joined The Women’s Auxiliary Service at the 9th Division in Margilon. My parents remained in Iran, in a civilian camp.
Encampment, 5 February 1943