1. [Personal data:]
Platoon Officer Cadet Tadeusz Henryk Szonert, 25 years old, forester of the State Forests, married.
2. [Date and circumstances of arrest:]
On 10 February 1940, I was deported deep into Russia.
3. [Name of the camp, prison or place of forced labor:]
I was displaced to Novosibirsk Oblast, Tisul region (the village of Oktyabrsk). The Central Gold Mines.
4. [Description of the camp, prison:]
The village of Oktyabrsk was inhabited by deportees – officers of the State Forests Administration and the State Forests Management in Białowieża. An NKVD commander lived with the deportees in the village. The deportees and their families lived in barracks. It was not uncommon that two or even three families lived together. A four-by-five- meter room was occupied by up to eight people – often most of them were children. The conditions of the buildings were very bad, the roofs were leaking, the barracks were cold, and low temperatures really took their toll.
5. [Social composition of prisoners, POWs, deportees:]
The majority of the deportees were Polish, although there were also Belarusians and Ukrainians among the lower-ranked officers (forest rangers). The moral standing of the lower-ranked officers was very low (although there were exceptions and some lower-ranked officers did better in this respect than people who held managerial positions). Mutual relations were very bad: lower-ranked officers (forest rangers) were hostile towards their former superiors, that is, foresters, district forest managers, and inspectors. This happened mostly in the case of people of Belarusian or Ukrainian nationality. Those people claimed that they had been harassed back in Poland, where they were forced to work for their lords.
They harassed their former superiors whenever they could. For example, one of the rangers with whom I worked in the mineshaft told me to take off my shoulder straps. When I said no, he approached me with two Bolsheviks and tore the straps off. Another ranger named Kruk (who is probably serving in the Polish army in the Middle East) beat his children until they bled when they spoke Polish. Many of them informed the NKVD authorities about the attitudes and ideas etc. of other people.
6. [Life in the camp, prison:]
Some deportees worked in gold mines, others in the woods, or did other types of physical work. At the beginning, the work in the mineshafts lasted six hours, and after the war began – eight hours. The work on the surface lasted eight hours at the beginning, and ten hours after the military operations started. The working conditions were terrible, especially in the mine. The humidity made our life a misery. Half an hour after we started working, we were soaking wet, but we had to work until the end of the shift, that is, another seven and a half hours. The temperatures fell as low as 40 degrees below zero. Winter started in the second half of October and ended in April, although there were heavy snows even in May. The average remuneration of a worker was 150-200 rubles, although some individuals earned great amounts of money, but those were rare exceptions. The only food we received was bread, and the ration for a worker was one kilogram. Family members who were unfit for work, that is, wives with children younger than two years of age (if the children were older, women were forced to work) and children below 14 years old – 400 grams. Rarely, once a month, we received half a kilogram of sugar, half a kilogram of margarine, some herring, fish or similar products. Our diet was based on bread and potatoes. The deportees planted the potatoes on their own in fields that they had cleared themselves. There were tight social circles that formed depending on the intellectual standing of individuals and their views on the situation. The cultural life was at a very low level, but we received newspapers in Russian, such as Izvestia, Pravda, etc.
7. [Attitude of the authorities, the NKVD, towards Poles:]
The NKVD and Bolsheviks from the party had a very negative attitude towards us. Very frequently, we received news about the Soviet Union, its strength, industry, etc., while information about Poland was presented from the worst possible angle (e.g. landowners using people to plow the land, exploitation of priests, religious blindness). Anti-religious lectures were frequent.
8. [Medical assistance, hospitals, mortality:]
The medical assistance was average. The hygienic conditions in the hospital were awful, as well as the food.
9. [Was it possible to keep in touch with the home country and your family? If yes, what contacts were permitted?]
I received letters, money, and packages from my family residing in Białystok, as well as letters from German-occupied Poland.
10. [When were you released and how did you join to the army?]
I was released on 31 August 1941. I came to Buzuluk with my wife and one-year-old child. From there, my family and I were sent to the south, where the next divisions were supposed to be organized in two or three weeks. I was in Jalalabat Oblast. Our daughter died on our way to the south. I joined the army on 27 January 1942.