Gulag Teenager

Translated by Magdalena Brzeska



    Like wind that breaks the fetters of Eol
    And happily hums a light-hearted tune
    Swaying the woods, the gardens, the fields
    While laughing, it suddenly wakes the Polish spring

    So did our hearts that fed on our hope
    And have for six years longed native bread
    Were made so delighted, so fully indeed
    That needed no more and nothing else

    They left life that was cruel and bad
    With thoughts they run to their native land
    They could not, could not cease to rejoice
    As flowers in May do with the sun

    Further and faster the train is moving
    Through empty fields of Kazakhstan
    It is so hard, so hard to believe
    That this grim fate is going to change



    It is 19th February 1948. At dawn, a cargo train departs from Pavlodar, with its long line of carriages, like a returning flock of birds. The train is going eastwards, towards Omsk, because in Pavlodar there is no bridge to cross Irtysh. There, it will turn around and go west, straight to Poland. At that time I was seventeen.

    When the train moved, a strange feeling of happiness went through the crowd. In our carriage there were ten families.

    At first, there was weeping everywhere - these were mainly tears of joy, but not only, as not everyone was lucky enough to return to the homeland. Almost every family left someone they were close to, to sleep for eternity in the midst of the Siberian land. Later, the hymn "One that surrenders to the Lord, and Him truly trusts with the fullness of the heart..." sounded. The words that followed were sung with particular strength "He will lead you out of hostile lands and He will protect from plague..."

    When the emotional moments past, everyone lied down on the plank beds and begun to recall the long and difficult years they have spend in the foreign land. Those were years of fight against the cruelty of hunger and cold, years of longing for the homeland, years of struggle to stay alive and to stay Polish.

    There were twelve Polish families on the Farm No: 3 of the Kalinin Kolkhoz, in the Pavlodar province of the Kazakh Soviet Republic.

    They lived temporarily in a large granary which looked like a barn. There were no houses available for deportees from Poland. The kolkhoz authorities promised many times, that by the end of May, when the native Kazakhs will leave to take their cattle for pasturing, there will be some free houses where Poles will be able to move into.

    The Farm No: 3 was a small village, a part of an agriculture complex which included five farms and a Central -a large village in the middle. All farms focused on animal husbandry. Each farm was located three kilometres from the others. On one side of the farms stretched out the meadows, all the way up to the river Irtysh. One of its banks was very high. There lied the town Pavlodar, which stretches along the bank for five kilometres. The other side of the farms were boundless steppes, without a single tree, a plain as far as the sight could reach. In the summer, when the temperatures get very high, as it is in the continental climate, on can see an illusory river, a mirage, which no one has ever reached.

    In the summer, there was haymaking on the meadows, whereas the cattle were pastured on the steppes. On the farm there were mainly Kazakhs, a few Russian families and one German family.

    The president of the kolkhoz farm was a Russian man, named Klemienkov, the secretary was also a Russian, a man named Dirapov. The latter was, I think, the most important person as he didn´t move on foot but used a trashpanka, a type of a two-wheeled cart, like a wagonette, pulled by a mare called Maruska.

    A German named Fryzyn was the livestock specialist, whereas the one responsible for keeping everything in order was a Kazakh, who performed the function of a kolkhoz manager. He was very mean.

    There wasn´t a single tree on the farm, perhaps because it wouldn´t stand the harsh winters or the dry summers. But it may have been so because nobody ever thought of planting a tree there.

    On both sides of the road there were about twenty houses or, more accurately, dugouts. On the side there were long cowsheds, the bases, which frightened with their appearance. The bases and the dugouts were surrounded with fences made out of dung. In the middle of the farm there was a proper house (the office), it did not have roofing however, but the wooden rafters stuck out like ribs of a skeleton. In this house there was the kolkhoz office, the meeting room and the food store where one could buy bread or flour, if one had food vouchers. Next to this house there was the granary in which we lived. All homesteads were made out of raw clay. The soil there is completely clayey. The granary was quite high, without windows, but there were lots of holes in the door, so it was unbelievably cold inside.

    I was eleven years old, extremely sensitive, and felt very bad in this foreign country and crowded house. One can imagine these twelve families all living together. In most cases those were families with many children. There were a few men and mothers with children, both small and older, there were also grandparents. My mother Franciszka, my sister Zofia and my grandma Paulina Orlowska also lived there.

    All adults and those underage were forced to work in the field (primitive potato planting, sowing vegetables, clearing out the dung etc.). Every morning the kolkhoz manager used to come in and shout "Get up all of you, you sons of bitches, it is time to work. Who doesn´t work, will not eat." And so the emaciated mothers and their older children would go to work. My mum weighted now forty kilos, whereas before the war - seventy. Her hands were not used to the spade or the fork and so were full of blisters, which used to break and bleed.

    The pay was a voucher for half a kilo of bread per day. For monthly income in cash one could privately buy two kilos of bread. My grandma and I used to get two hundred grams of bread per day extra, such was the due amount for the so called additionally fed. The work lasted a whole day.

    In this common house there was no kitchen. The soup had to be cooked outside. A pot was placed on the bricks and the fire was lighted. Dried cattle waste, called kiziaks was used as fuel for the fire. (The only thing was that) However, there was nothing to put into the pot except for sorrel which, together with the other children, I would collect in the valleys. My grandma´s duty was to cook, whereas I was to collect not only sorrel but also cattle waste for the fire (the latter was my duty for all six years).

    To have something to cook we had to exchange (to trade) things brought from Poland. The first to go was my favourite brick-red coat. Because a Russian woman liked it, she wanted it for her daughter. It was very hard for me. My mum tried to explain that soon I would grow out of it anyway, but for me it was difficult to accept. I was sad. Then my mum would say that one can not eat a coat.

    The struggle to survive begun. Towels, bedclothes and other things had to be exchanged. I remember how after dusk, because during the day mum worked, we would go to the Farm No: 4 to exchange the things. My mum would bargain, because they didn´t want to give even half a pood (8kg) of flour for a set of bedclothes. Mum would carry the flour for three kilometres and was happy there would be something to eat especially that one could go without the bedclothes. In a way there was something to eat, but only two times a day and not to the full, so that the flour could last longer. We would also get a food parcel from Poland send by our relatives from time to time. But as it is said - the day is frequent, whereas the food vouchers would expire, as bread would not arrive on time and vouchers were only valid on the stamped date. I constantly thought about food. At night I would dream about Poland, my family home and bread. Out of all the Polish children with whom we lived I liked the three year old Miecio Lojewski the most. He was so small and pretty. He had big, dark and sad eyes and curly hair.

    One day a loud cry and weeping of a young woman came from our multifamily house. Miecio died of diphtheria. His younger brother Jacek died soon after. Mrs Lojewska didn´t have any more children.

    The Kazakhs left for pasturing and the houses were becoming empty. My family moved into a one-room mud hut. Almost half of the room was occupied by a stove that also served as a bed. Mum and Zosia were doing weeding, grandma was looking after the house and cooking the soup whereas I was out looking for fire fuel to get enough stock and be ready for the winter. I walked the steppe with a sack and collected the kiziaks, taking them home and arranging them in the hall so that as many as possible would fit.

    The kiziaks were made like bricks. Dung was taken out with forks onto a heap and then watered. Then a ox would tramp this whole thing. Zosia worked making out the kiziaks. One can imagine what it was like to spend a whole day getting oneself dirty with manure as one used the hands to place it in the moulds.

    There was always some kneaded dung left over, so after sunset Polish children including me would go to make a few kiziaks for ourselves.

    My other duty was to buy bread in exchange for food vouchers. Most of the time instead of bread there was flour but this they would only give half the due amount. The salesman was a Kazakh, quite young, named Urombay. He treated Polish clients very badly and he especially detested me. Every time when I was waiting in the queue I was trembling with fear, I was so scared of him. When I would get close to the counter and stretch out my sack, he would show his teeth like a dog and shout loudly in Russian. I understood every word. "Look", he would shout, "this horrible Polish girl can not even hold her bag properly, she has stiff hands, dead I think! If you won´t learn to hold your sack, you will not get any flour next week!" And then he would swear in Kazakh and repeat "she´s worth nothing, she´s worth nothing, she´s dead..."

    I would lower my head and tears would run down my cheeks like a stream. He would shout again "look how she´s crying" and swear again!!! Something from that time remained in me - I fear people without a reason and often repeat that I am worth nothing. After such shopping trip I could not sleep. Again and again I heard the wild voice of Urombay. Lying there I recalled the spring night between 12th and 13th April 1940, when somebody knocked very loudly at our door. The knocking was so loud as if someone was trying to force the door open. That night I couldn´t sleep as I wanted the morning to come so that I could go to school. We were to make a page from the calendar for homework. I painted one with colourful flowers.

    The knocking frightened me very much.

    "Who is it?" mum asked.

    "Open up! This is NKVD. We have an order to search your house! We were told that you have weapons!"

    "It is good that dad is not home" mum said quietly.

    My dad, as a non-commissioned officer of the Polish Army was mobilised and went to his military unit in Grodno before the war begun. Then he was interned in Lithuania. He returned home before Christmas. However, before he got home mum was warned that when he will return he will be arrested at once because before the war he was in the POW 1and then he was abroad so he could be a spy. Dad was hiding.

    So the unwelcome Russian soldiers stormed our home. They told us to get dressed and not to say anything.

    In my clothes I was sitting on the bed and trembled as if I had a bout of shivers. The soldiers turned everything that was in our house upside down. All my books and notebooks were tipped out of my school bag. In the middle of the room there lay a big piece of paper with the date 13th April 1940 on it. Shyly I stood up and with trembling hands I gathered together the school accessories and begun to put them back into the bag, thinking that the search will end and it will be time to go to school. Suddenly, one of the NKVD officials caught me by the neck as if a dog and threw me onto the bed. "One can not move during a search" he said. The search went on and on. Weapons were not found. They asked where father was. Each one of us answered that we didn´t know. Then the verdict was announced. It sentenced us to a forced exile.

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