1. [Personal details:]
Rifleman Leonard Miron, student, unmarried.
2. [Date and circumstances of arrest:]
Deported from Białystok on 13 April 1940, as a family member of an arrested party (father).
3. [Name of the camp, prison, place of forced labor:]
Place of deportation: Pavlodar oblast, Urluptiup region, kolkhoz [Soviet collective farm], 1 May.
4. [Description of the camp, prison:]
A kolkhoz in the steppes of northern Kazakhstan near the Irtysh River. Agricultural area. Houses built of clay. Low, damp housing, whitewashed inside. Not the worst hygienic conditions.
5. [Identity of the prisoners, prisoners of war, exiles:]
Practically all the deportees were from the same city. Poles and Jews deported, as [well as] the families of arrested officials, policemen, and factory owners.
6. [Life in the camp, prison:]
After arriving at the place of exile, Poles, not having gotten a job, lived on their own money by selling their belongings. The living conditions depended mainly on the material situation of the deportees. Those who were poorer, who didn’t have much to sell, worked for richer kolkhoz farmers in return for food products. In 1941, they allowed us to move to a district town with the permission of the head of the NKVD, having previously gotten a job. Together with the deported Persians, the Poles worked as lumberjacks and landworkers.
7. [Attitude of the NKVD authorities towards Poles:]
The NKVD authorities treated Poles like their own citizens who had been deported. They laughed when someone stressed that he was Polish. Kolkhoz farmers were forbidden to talk to deportees about politics. No communist propaganda was conducted. We learned about what was happening in the country from letters and newspapers sent by relatives and friends.
8. [Medical care, hospitals, mortality:]
We used the medical care and hospitals like Soviet citizens.
9. [Describe the kind of communication you had with your family and country, if there was any?]
We maintained correspondence with relatives and friends from the country who supported us by sending money and food parcels.
10. [When were you released and how did you get into the army?]
After the amnesty was announced, on the basis of documents received stating that the deportee is a Polish citizen, it was possible to change one’s place of residence.
I was sent to the army at my own request on 14 October 1941, to Tatishchev. When passing through Kuibyshev, I was directed by the Polish authorities to the south of the USSR, where the army was to be organized. There was no information about the Polish army in the south at that time, so I returned to the city of Buzuluk, where I joined the Polish Army on 22 January 1942.