Paweł Motyk, rifleman, born in 1922 in Zadniszówka village, district Skałat, voivodeship Tarnopol.
My family and I (four people) were deported on 10 February 1940 at 5 AM. We were taken to the Borki Wielkie station and loaded onto railway wagons, 25 people in each. The same day, at 5 PM, they led us to get water, pointing a gun at us all the time. In Kijów they gave us food. We got half a kilo of bread, half a liter of soup and three buckets of hot water for every wagon. When we arrived in Sybir and the train stopped, we jumped out of the wagons, filled those buckets with snow and melted it. We had no water, and our children were thirsty. We were all black with the dirt, and we got lice. In Turinsk they reloaded us onto a train that had previously served to transport wood. The ride was 20 kilometers long. After that, they threw us into the barracks. During the next four days, they were giving each of us half a liter of soup and a bit of hot water. Next, they took us to Oziorki, Tabori region, in Sverdlovsk Oblast. We got there by sled.
After we got there, forced labor in the woods began. The snow was waist-deep.
In 1940, during Pentecost, I was arrested because I hadn’t gone to work. They promised us that if we worked on Sunday, they’d give us pierogi. They thought that the first time we saw pierogi was in the USSR. One of my colleagues said that if they were in Poland, they’d [illegible]. They locked him up for what he said. He was under arrest for three days with nothing to eat.
28 August was the day of the amnesty. Men wanted to join the Polish Army, but they forbade it, which mattered not a bit because we decided to join our army anyway. They didn’t want us, and I had to go to the kolkhoz Kurgan-Rometan next to Bukhara. From there I went to Tehran and joined the Polish Army there.
What is described above is true.