1. Personal data (name, surname, rank, age, occupation, and marital status):
Lieutenant Wacław Pietrzak, 39 years old, regular service officer, married.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
I was arrested on 7 November, 1939, in Kołomyja, on the way to Śniatyń, from where I was going to reach Romania. I was arrested at the railway station by the NKVD with the active assistance of a militiaman, supposedly the local cobbler named Hawryluk.
3. Name of the camp, prison, forced labor site:
11 November – 13 December 1939, prison in the city of Stanisławów;
22 December 1939 – 31 March 1940, prison in Kherson, USSR;
1 April 1940 – 26 July 1941, prison in the city of Mykolaiv;
16 – 28 August 1941, prison in Tomsk.
4. Description of the camp, prison, etc. (area, buildings, living conditions, hygiene):
The prison area was usually surrounded by a wall up to five meters tall, topped additionally with barbed wire. Moreover, there were guard posts spaced irregularly on these walls. Guards got up the ladders and pulled the ladders behind them. They had floodlights and cable connections, certainly for the alarm bells. I noticed that everywhere we came, they immediately made the walls taller. The walls were built by Russian prisoners.
The prison buildings were usually made of bricks. In Kherson, the cells were very dark and terribly damp, those in Mykolaiv were so rife with bedbugs that if you hadn’t seen it, you’d never believe that there could be so many bedbugs in one place. Additionally, in Mykolaiv, there were huge centipedes – or something like that – nesting in the cracks, chocolate- colored, measuring up to 15 centimeters. There were also lice, more in winter and fewer in summer. The most elegant and sanitary of the prisons was the one in Stanisławów (Poland). Everywhere was incredibly crowded. All flat surfaces were used for sleeping. A normal (or even better) place to sleep was under a bed or on a plank bed. Five of us slept on two iron beds without any pallets, lying of course across the beds, with legs dangling from the knees down. This was in Mykolaiv. We were given no bedding, no underwear, no clothes.
We had a bath (always with a disinfecting of clothes) every ten days on average, we had our beards and hair cut twice a month. In Kherson we didn’t have our hair cut at all, we wore enormous beards. There were two trips to the toilets a day in groups of around 15 people. This was also when we washed at the taps. We were taken for a walk once a day for around 5-10 minutes.
5. Composition of POWs, prisoners, exiles (nationality, category of crimes, intellectual and moral level, mutual relations, etc.):
The prisoners I lived with were for the most part Poles imprisoned by the NKVD, usually for attempting to cross the border. There were also a lot of state officials imprisoned for “not making a revolution” in Poland. The majority of them had secondary or university education. There were also some police officers, border guards, and drivers. The latter for the most part had returned from Romania or from Hungary, reported to the militia – and were imprisoned. In other cells, there were Carpatho-Rusyns, as they were called. These were kept separately. Sometimes, however, they were brought to our cells, too. They usually served as informers, called kapusie [stoolies]. Carpatho-Rusyns came to Poland during the Bolshevik occupation “to take cows and land”, as it was said. The NKVD talked about them with distaste. They said that since they had come to feast upon “the carrion of the neighboring lands, they were bad and unreliable people”. Around 10 per cent of the prisoners were Jews, usually “fugitives from Hitler.”
There were no disputes among nationalities. It was possible to distinguish two groups among the Poles: the “pro-government” ones and the National Democrats, but discussions and disputes were serious and civil.
6. Life in the camp, prison, etc. (daily routine, working conditions, quotas, wages, food, clothing, social and cultural life, etc.):
The prisoners I was with were always under investigation, and so they were never used for any work outside the cell. We passed the time by learning languages, having talks about various professional fields (agriculture, mining, etc.), during evenings retelling novels we’d read or films we’d seen. We often played chess, and ridiculed the commissars. Food varied, the worst was in Stanisławów and Tomsk.
7. The NKVD authorities’ attitude towards Poles (interrogation method, torture, punishments, communist propaganda, information about Poland, etc.):
I went through the toughest NKVD interrogation in Stanisławów. I was being interrogated without interruption for two days and one night, which meant that during that time I wasn’t let out of the office, where I slept for three to four hours a day and where I was brought food, which I didn’t actually eat. The interrogation consisted of me sitting still on a chair in front of a sledovatel [investigator], who was carrying out his job and who would tell me every 15 minutes, “Come on, confess.” This method was very exhausting mentally. Near the end of the interrogation, I was so weak that I could only speak in a whisper. During one day, around five sledovateli took turns with me. What interested them the most was which organization was sending Poles abroad. They also inquired about Colonel Perc or Pelc. I should stress that in Kołomyja they were being assisted during the interrogations by a local lawyer, supposedly called Rozenkranc. I found that the sledovateli were unintelligent and inept. It was possible to dupe them. I, for example, was being accused of espionage.
8. Medical aid, hospitals, mortality (list the names of the dead):
Medical aid in theory was good. Everyday there was a visit by a nurse with medicines, frequent visits by a doctor. During my time, around five people died. I remember two names: 1. Zborowski, court president from Kraków, 2. Waldman, a police officer, I think, from the Małopolska region.
9. How did contact with one’s country and family look, if there was any?
During all that time I had no contact with my family. Even though the examining judge let me write, the prison warden didn’t want to give his permission. We were isolated in a very competent and professional way, so it was difficult to communicate even with the cell next door. Unless we knocked (using the prison alphabet). No newspapers. We were given brochures about Communism, Lenin, Stalin, etc. Once, our cell was given the book Ziemia w jarzmie [The Land under a Yoke] by Wanda Wasilewska. The novel had a depressing effect and inspired hatred towards the author.
10. When were you released and how did you reach the army?
I was released from prison in Tomsk on 28 August 1941. As I was leaving, I received 25 rubles. I worked as a carrier. I carried sacks and wood from a barge to the riverbank. That is how other Polish colleagues worked. We were saving up money to leave. At last, we rented several railway cars for 1500 rubles each, and we left Tomsk for Buzuluk on 3 October 1941. On 21 October, I arrived at Buzuluk and enlisted in the Polish army.