In January of 1941, when my dad was just 21 years old, he was arrested by Russian forces on the newly formed border in Poland. The Germans had attacked from the west and the Russians from the east—carving Poland brutally in half.

 

My dad had been visiting his brother in another city, Lutsk, and decided to return home to his aging parents in their village. But on his way back, the Russians seized him. It hardly mattered which side of the border he stood on. He was Polish, he was young, and Russia wanted to obliterate Poland’s future. Their labour camps needed bodies for mines, railways, and roads.

 

On a trumped-up charge, my dad was thrown in jail. It was a bitter winter. From Poland he was transported in boxcars all the way to the Black Sea, to Kherson near Odessa. Six hundred men crammed into concrete spaces—cold floors, minimal food, boiling water as a ration, and small pieces of black bread. Prisoners of the Soviet machine.

 

From the Kherson prison he was tried and sentenced to five years of hard labour in the far north, in Archangel—known to Poles as Archangelsk. By summer they were packed into boxcars again and shipped off.

 

Once there, he was given an address. And so he wrote to his brother—his first contact since leaving Lutsk. No one had heard a single word from him; they assumed the worst. In his letter he asked for a food package: dried bread, garlic, onions. In the starving, lice-infested, freezing camps, garlic and onions were medicine. Disease was everywhere.

 

It was summer then, and they all knew the winter ahead would be a monster.

 

Winter food was porridge/ kasha, boiled water, dried fish, fish soup and bread rations.

His brother’s family—living under Russian occupation and struggling themselves—gathered what they could. Bread. Garlic. Onions. Whatever scraps of comfort they could spare. They packed everything into cotton sugar sacks and stitched them by hand.

 

And somehow, unbelievably, that package made it to my dad. In the gulag, he received a care package.

 

So did others. Men relied on these parcels for survival and for trade—cans of food, warm clothing, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, even a little money. The mail system, astonishingly, was more reliable then than now—despite camp commandants stealing whatever they wished.

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Labour camps theoretically offered mail service, but hardly anyone managed to write home. Prisoners had no paper, no pencils, no money for stamps. Censors burned letters, confiscated them, or simply used them as cigarette paper.

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Note: When 'amnesty' was declared, Kazimierz made his way south, joined the Polish army forming there, and evacuated to Persia. After training in the Middle East, he fought in the Italian Campaign.

After the war, he settled in Canada.

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Copyright: Anne Kaczanowski 

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