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September 1939

I had a very happy childhood in Grzybow, near Slonim, in East Poland, not far from the Russian border. In winters we would go skiing and tobogganing, and in the summer we played by the fish lakes and I was very fond of horses.

Then the war started, with the Germans invading from the west, and the Russians came on the 17th of September.
At first, life continued as normal, but after a few days, the Russians took possession of our farm, and evicted us- my mother, brother and myself. Having nowhere to go, we travelled to my grandparent’s house seventeen miles from ours. They lived in Plawskie. We had quite an anxious time there, because some of the local people were cooperating with the Russians, because they were already in occupation of us. Our grandparents were quite old by then, and we stayed with them until 10th February 1940.

Very early in the morning, about six o’ clock, we were awoken by Russian soldiers and local officials, who told my mother that she, my brother, and me would be taken away, but we did not know where. We had to take only what we could carry, and some supply of food for the journey. Our grandparents were allowed to stay in their house. It was a very cold winter, but we managed to take warm clothes with us. They took us back to the Slonim railway station, and loaded us into a cattle train, which was furnished with two rows of bunks, and a very small fire. By then, we found out that there were about thirty-five people in our wagon, and in the meantime, they were bringing more and more people to the train. The toilet arrangements were a hole in the floor, with no privacy at all. That was how we started our journey into the unknown.

We could recognise certain areas of Poland through the cracks in the walls, as we headed east towards Russia, but we were still not sure of where we were going. We got as far as Minsk, and they made us change trains, still a cattle one, which accommodated more people into the wagon. We continued our journey, now in Russia.

Sometimes we had to wait for two or three days to allow the army trains to get through to the front line. We were travelling towards Vologda. We reached a small station call Morzenga, which was about 200km north of Vologda, in the middle of nowhere. They unloaded us, and a caravan on one-horse sledges were waiting for us in the dozens, as they could only take two people and a driver on. Sledges were modelled on the Eskimos’ ones. There was some hay, which was spread out by the driver. I sat with my mother, and my brother had to walk. We still had some bread from my grandparents’ house, and a blanket, which kept us very warm in the severe frost. After some distance, we dived into a big forest, which surrounded us for hours on end. Eventually, we got to a small village where we stopped for the night. We still had guards with us. No food was given to us, so our mother offered some bread and fat to a driver, who was happy to accept it. The local population were very sympathetic towards us, but they could not help us in any way.

We must have travelled for five days with the caravan, when in the middle of a forest, a number of wooden barracks appeared. People were directed towards it, and there were fourteen people in our group trying to keep together. We got a very small corner to rest, but we didn’t mind being in a crowd, as at last it was warm. My brother had to walk one hundred and thirty-five kilometres to the camp called Krutaya Osip. We were allowed to rest for two days.

They introduced us to very hard work lumber jacking. Even I had to go into the deep forest and learn with my mother how to cut the trees. We had to accept that if we didn’t work we didn’t eat. If we did work, we received 400g of bread. It sounds a lot, but it wasn’t, and we were beginning to feel hungry all the time. There was no tea or coffee, but we were introduced to drinking boiled water, which was called Kipiatok in Russian. It had to be boiled to kill all the bacteria and viruses it carried. The men were sent deeper into the forest, where they stayed lumber jacking for a while. In the summer, timber was piled on the riverbanks, and pushed into the river to transport it to the lumber mills. There was a danger in the deep forest, as bears would appear in the spring for food.

We still had some possessions of our clothes, and some people had jewellery, so people used to go to the villages to exchange it for food. My mother exchanged a blanket for a goat, which proved to be a lifesaver. Goats milk is very fatty, and full of all sorts of good things. That might have been the reason why we kept well. The most common illness being blindness after sundown, or scurvy, which was very painful. A good source of vitamins was onions, but it was impossible to get any vegetables of any kind.
If we wanted to go to the villages, we had to get permission from the N.K.V.D officer (the head of police.) mother was very good at producing some food from practically nothing; she used stinging nettles and sorrel.

By now, we were in contact with our grandparents in Poland, and we understood that the Red Cross allowed parcels to come to us, but many of them were never received. Spring of 1941 arrived, and we were told that we would never return to Poland. We were given farrows of soil in the garden, so mother asked our grandparents to send us some seeds. We began to reap the harvest. Other people who did not accept their vegetable plots were laughing at mother that she would be staying in Russia.
Mother was sharing her vegetables with people who she thought would benefit from them, and the goat’s milk was given to children to drink.

I helped the doctor’s wife in her house and her garden, and she taught me how to survive. In the autumn, we could gather raspberries, cranberries and other fruits from the forest. She suggested we put them in some containers, cover them with water, as winter was approaching; it was the first time we benefited from the frost, and we had our very own freezer!

Being constantly told that we would never return to Poland, my brother demanded that I must go to school and learn Russian, and still get ration of bread. After long discussions, I was allowed to go to school in the camp, and that was a blessing, because I was saved from lumber jacking.

The teacher was very kind to me. Her husband was in the Russian army, on the warfront. There were a lot of Russian casualties, and she did not get any news of him for a long time, so she was glad to discuss him with me.

By now the Germans were attacking Russians, and they were reaching near to Moscow. Under the pressure from Britain and America, the Soviet Union and Polish Government-In-Exile signed a paper, which said that we were friends with Russia, and everybody who was deported to Russia was told that we are free. We were given a piece of paper which said that we, as Polish citizens, are free, allowed to move wherever we wanted without any hindrance.

We understood that the Polish army was forming in Jallalabad, so we were aiming to get there. We got there by a long journey on a train, similar to the one we arrived in. We found accommodation with an Uzbeck family, and my brother proceeded to join the army, but he was suddenly ill with typhoid fever. He was taken into the military hospital.

To get some extra food, I was trying to scrounge some from by the army cookhouse, where I met a person who came from a person who came from our town in Poland. He was the baker in the army, so from that day I was never hungry again. He also told us there will be transport going to Teheran, but we had no documents, so the idea was for my mother and I to get into the station without stopping for anything else onto the train! Our friend told the guards not to stop us. That was how we got out of Russia and into Persia.

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