Master Corporal Edward Rewiński, from Headquarters of the 1st Carpathian Rifle Brigade.
In 1939 I was taken captive by the Soviets near Brześć, and from there I was transported to Russia to the prisoners of war camp in Kozelsk. During the transport we didn’t get anything to eat for three days, only in Mińsk did some civilians throw in pieces of bread, apples and cigarettes, etc. through our windows. We were living on that.
When we arrived to Kozelsk we were placed in an Orthodox church where tiered bunks were set up. We were sleeping on bare boards without any bedding. It was very cold and filthy inside those walls. In the morning we got 300 grams of bread and few spoons of cabbage with fish, and nothing else. After several weeks we were getting some more food, but we were driven to work for our own needs, for example to harvest potatoes for ourselves. On 20 October some of us were released home. They brought us to the train station in Cimkowicze near Nieśwież, somewhere around the Polish frontier. They let us through the gate and said stupayte domoy [go home]. On 26 October I was home.
On 13 April 1940 at 5 a.m., while we were still asleep, someone knocked on our door. We opened and the NKVD came in with a couple of soldiers with bayonets. My brother and I were arrested on the spot, they searched our home looking for guns, and then the NKVD officer looked in a book and read out the names of the whole family. Then he said: Ne pugaytes’, my vam nichevo plokhovo ne zdelayem; budietie v tom samom gosudarstve, tol’ko v drugoy oblasti [Don’t be afraid, we won’t do you any harm, but the Soviet authorities are resettling you; you’ll be in the same country but in a different oblast]. We had two hours to prepare ourselves, 100 kilograms of baggage per person. The following members of my family were taken: my father (79 years old), mother (67 years old), my sister with her three children, the two of us – me and my brother – and his wife. Afterwards we were loaded on farm carts and we went to the train station in Stołpce where hundreds of thousands of women with children and old men were already waiting. We were loaded onto the train wagons, 50 people in one wagon, and even more in some of them. It was very crowded during the transport, and they were taking us out once a day and only when we begged them. On the third day we got something to eat: some bread and soup and from then on every day they gave us bread, soup and kipiatok [boiling water]. We were on the road for thirteen days and on 26 April we reached Siberia, Severo-Kazakhstanskaya Oblast, Aiyrtau region, Voskrietienka rural settlement, were they brought us and dumped us onto the street. They didn’t give us any dwellings, we had to rent them and pay for them, 50 rubles a month. They didn’t get us any jobs either so we could earn a living. I had to go from one rural settlement to another and look for a job at Kyrgyzes. While I was doing that we lived from selling out clothes. Women who came without men but with children couldn’t earn any money, so they were starving, some of them were begging. I heard that some families were brought and put in the Kyrgyz rural settlements, where it was impossible to live in that filthy nation, so people ran away to the Russian rural settlements.
Predstavitel’ sel’sovieta(the member of the rural settlement authorities) was threatening us saying: you, burzhui [big spenders], bringing a lot of clothes, we’ll strip you of them right away. You’ll be just like us. And don’t even think that your Poland will come back. Poland will never come back.
We were writing letters to Poland and we were receiving them from Poland. There were descriptions of what was happening in our country. For example, one of the farmers refused to obey the Soviet authorities and didn’t go to the forest to transport wood. It was in 1940, in the Wołożyn commune. The Soviet court, called narodnyi sud [people’s court], in the town of Wołożyn sentenced this farmer to seven years in jail with confiscation of his whole property.
Old Russian people were very friendly to us and they were treating us well, only those young who were growing up in the 20s, these young savages, the Komsomol [All-Union Leninist Young Communist League members] were scowling at us.
In April 1941 I was taken for forced labor at the construction of the railroad in Akmolinsk Oblast, the Akmolinsk – Karaganda line, where hundreds of thousands of people had been rounded up. They were living in the train wagons and in tents. They were earning three to five rubles a day, and they could hardly survive on that. The work was very hard, we were building the station, digging foundations. It was really exhausting. After three months at these works, I came back to my family.
The attitude of Soviet authorities towards the Polish people was bad. The NKVD was always telling lies. In January 1942 I submitted an application to the Polish authorities (through the Soviet authorities) to request joining the Polish Army.
On 2 February, 1942, I was called up for the Polish Army.
16 February 1943