1. [Personal data:]
Volunteer Barbara Piekart, born in 1911 in [illegible], 32 years old, teacher, married.
2. [Date and circumstances of arrest:]
I was arrested at the border, I and [illegible] tried to cross to the German side.
3. [Name of the camp, prison, forced labor site:]
I was in prisons in Białystok, Baranavichy, Moscow, and Novosibirsk. From Novosibirsk, I was transported to Timir-Tau [Temirtau] labor camps, Gornoshoria station in the Altai Mountains.
4. [Description of the camp, prison:]
The prisons in Poland and in Moscow were made of bricks. Next to the buildings housing cells, there were baths and hospitals. We rarely used the bath, the hospital accepted those who were gravely ill. Due to the shortage of beds, we usually slept on the cement floor, spreading coats, dresses, etc. Those who slept in beds had dirty pallets with a bit of worn straw. In Moscow, we slept on clean but bare plank beds, and in Novosibirsk, on dirty ones, infested with bedbugs. In 10-person cells there were as many as 43 people or more, 100 people and more in the 18-person cells, and 12-13 people in single-person cells. In Novosibirsk, in a cell measuring four by ten meters, there were 160 prisoners. At times it was so stuffy that women fainted, and all of them were literally drenched in sweat. There was almost no air coming in because the windows were covered with wooden crates.
5. [The composition of POWs, prisoners, exiles:]
There were usually multiple nationalities in the cells: Russian women, Poles, Gypsies, Swiss, Estonians, Lithuanians, Chinese. As for the crimes, there were political prisoners, thieves, bandits, and prostitutes. The intellectual and moral level was very low. The Russian thieves were often quite aggressive toward the Poles, who were only able to prevent rows with their great solemnity, calm, and composure.
6. [Life in the camp, prison:]
While we were tormented by idleness in the prisons, we collapsed under the burden of
quotas in camps. We had to carry 95 small or 67 large wheelbarrows of stones, wet clay, or
sand, after digging it up first. Sometimes the wheelbarrow would fall down as it was being
emptied, and getting it out took a lot of time; sometimes a mountain slope would slide down
and bury someone, or a cart with sand wouldn’t stop in time and would fall into a precipice;
someone’s pickaxe would hit their leg instead of rock. But there were no fatal accidents,
somehow. For work, we were given shirts, underwear, dresses, and telogreiki [jackets], as
well as old hard shoes that had to be given to the cobbler after work. Those who didn’t fill
the quota were given 450 grams of bread and three portions of something called balanda,
virtually water. We were constantly hungry.
7. [The NKVD authorities’ attitude towards Poles:]
I had no tough interrogations, but many other prisoners were even punched in the face. The Russians’ view of us was that all prisoners and deportees were exploiters who lived only from the work of the poor and the oppressed, they were the ones who had harassed those who had worked for them. They never failed to tell us that Poland would never be reborn, that it had fallen thanks to the bourgeois, that education had only been permitted to the bourgeois, etc.
8. [Medical aid, hospitals, mortality:]
Medical aid was insufficient due to the shortage of medical supplies. The mortality was quite high, especially among the men. 36-year-old Aleksandra Bogusławska from Grodno died in the Białystok prison. She’d had a stomach ailment for three months. Then, there was a 24-year-old woman who died of a lung disease. She came from the region near Jedwabne, close to Łomża.
9. [What did the contact with one’s country and family look like, if there was any?]
In the prisons, getting in contact with one’s family was out of the question. It was possible to do so with letters sent from the gulag, but unfortunately, the Russian-German war broke out.
10. [When were you released and how did you reach the army?]
I was released from the labor camp on 4 September 1941. I joined the Women’s Auxiliary Service on 6 August 1942, called to Yangiyul, I don’t know by whom.
4 February 1943