Corporal Officer Cadet Wiktor Gołębiewski, 33 years old, technologist-mechanic, married.
I was imprisoned by the Soviets on 18 September 1939 near Włodzimierz Wołyński, along with my whole division.
From September 1939 to May 1940, I was in the prisoner-of-war camp in Zaporizhia, following which – right up until I was released – I was in the north, near Tyva station, 800 kilometers north of Kotlas.
The number of prisoners of war in Zaporizhia was about 1,500. We lived in wooden barracks and slept on bunks. There were up to 30 of us in each small room, lice and bedbugs were our inseparable companions.
Although the housing and hygiene was very bad, in regard to the conditions in the north no words can describe the hideousness or how 20th-century man could debase himself and live like cattle.
The barracks, or rather the cowsheds, were mostly without windows, while the floors were covered with tarps full of holes. It was frequently the case that when it rained we all crowded together at one end of the barrack, and slept like that, before going to work at dawn. Initially we didn’t change our underwear, and all wore the clothes we had. There were lots of lice, but our biggest enemy were bedbugs – it was impossible to hide from them. We slept on the floor and on bunks made of round logs, somewhere near the entrance, and very often outside as well. In the camp there were Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and some Russians, but they worked as overseers or performed other functions.
As for mutual relations, it should be emphasized that the Poles, with a few exceptions, were those who did not break down and never renounced their nationality. I often met Poles who used to be supporters or even members of the Communist party in Poland, but now they vowed, with tears in their eyes, vengeance on the Soviets, and declared their readiness to die for Poland. A group that behaved particularly well comprised craftsmen and laborers from the big cities, that is, from places where pro-communist sympathies were – as it might have seemed – the strongest. Relations between the Poles and Ukrainians were always bad. A Pole would always see only an enemy in a Ukrainian. As for the Belarusians, their attitude towards Poles was indifferent, although some of them were hostile, but only after they had been stirred up by the Soviets. Jews were usually functionaries, people for whom there should be no place in an independent Poland.
The days in the camp were always the same, meaning work from dawn to dusk. In the summer we worked for 14 hours, in the winter – from 10 to 11. We worked at a railroad construction site, which meant felling trees, removing moss, and moving earth in wheelbarrows. We did most of the work standing in ankle-deep water and mud, digging in the ground barefoot, often standing on frozen ground.
The quotas were so high that it was simply impossible to meet them. A failure to meet the quota led to the food portions, already extremely small, being reduced further. The portions consisted of 300 to 800 grams of bread and some flour mixed with water once a day. Poles never met the quota, so they were given the worst food in addition to the harassment they experienced on the part of the camp authorities for alleged sabotage.
Initially, when we were still in Zaporizhia, the whole Soviet propaganda was aimed at converting all the prisoners, including Poles, if not into communists then at least into enthusiasts and supporters of the regime. We were simply forced to attend their lectures; neither promises nor even threats worked on us, and the Soviets finally admitted that during our stay in Zaporizhia we had spread so much propaganda among the locals that they would have to work at least 10 years to compensate for it. Despite efforts by the NKVD to capture the leaders and saboteurs, our stance remained the same: we were Polish and we wanted to return to Poland. The NKVD always carried out their interrogations in the same way: we were woken up at night, threatened with revolvers, and information of some kind or another was demanded of us..
For us Poles, one thing was a huge surprise: and that was the other Poles, whom we met everywhere and who shared their last piece of bread with us. In the north, prisoners worked until they collapsed from hunger. Then, nothing could help them and they were taken back, and as long as they were fit for work after recovering they could count on receiving a certain level of medical care. Ninety percent of prisoners working in our camp in the north suffered from scurvy and many of them died. We had almost no medications and we had only a pseudo-doctor who took our temperature and decided if we were to be granted sick leave based on that. The only thing that saved us was picking a few handfuls of berries at work or stealing a few potatoes. There was only one destination for those who did not want to work: the punishment cell (300 grams of bread and water). The punishment cell was an unheated shed, without any windows. Most of the people who stayed there for a week or longer died. It is simply impossible to describe in a few words the physical and moral tortures inflicted on those who did not want to bow down before them.
We had no contact with our families, although we were promised that if we worked, we would be allowed to receive letters from home. Receiving a letter was supposed to be a reward for work, so it is not surprising that we, Poles, did not receive any letters.
In July 1941, we were released from the camps and transported to Vyazniki, where I joined the Polish army in August 1941.