I was born on 14 March 1920 in Tuczno, Inowrocław district, Poznań voivodeship; I was head of a cooperative, unmarried.
I was deported to Russia on 10 February 1940 to the Arkhangelsk Oblast, to the locality of Gorelka. The posyolek [settlement] was located on a hill in the forest, 130 kilometers from the railway station. It comprised four barracks. One of them housed the office, bakery, and shop, while one hundred and fifty exiles lived in the other three. Working and living conditions were horrible. Living space was cramped and uncomfortable. The weeping of children and lamenting of the old had a disheartening effect on us people living in the forest wilderness.
You had to work hard because output quotas were very high, so that almost no one filled them, and therefore there was horrible hunger. 25 people died of hunger in our posyolek. The entire food for the day consisted of a piece of black bread, as there often wasn’t enough to make soup. Meetings, on the other hand, were frequent. The Bolsheviks praised their regime terribly and they very much wanted to make us believe that we, Poles, would never see our Fatherland again.
The NKVD authorities visited us quite frequently.
There weren’t any doctors at all in the posyolek, just a village physician. There were very few medicines. Pills were wrapped in newspapers.
I received quite a lot of letters from Poland, regularly every 14 days, the same was true for parcels with food, clothes, and money.
I joined the army, the 10th Infantry Division, on 26 February 1942, in Lugovoy.