Pelagia Borys, born on 20 August 1920 in the village of Kąty, district of Łomża,
Warsaw voivodeship. Civilian occupation: lived with her parents.

Pelagia was deported to Russia together with her family on 20 June 1941. The Soviets sent them to the Barnaul Oblast, to the region of Shipunovo train station, where there was a sovkhoz with a third degree of confinement. They worked at haying. The sovkhoz was pleasantly located on hilly, treeless ground, surrounded by meadows and fields, but the living conditions were very difficult, terrible in fact. In order to survive, you had to sell your clothes.

 

The rules of hygiene were not really observed. Pelagia didn’t hear anything about people dying in their sovkhoz or in the locality, for they were there only briefly – the amnesty was soon announced.

 

The prisoners in the sovkhoz were people who had lived along the eastern Polish border and also rich farmers, who had somehow fallen foul of the Soviet government. It was obligatory to fulfill two quotas, but the remuneration was poor – you would not even make enough to survive. Neither could they afford new clothes, especially as circumstances had forced them to sell those which they had taken from home.

The attitude of the Soviet authorities was unwaveringly hostile. There was absolutely no medical care and no hospitals.

 

After the amnesty was announced, they left Siberia and traveled south; Pelagia's mother died along the way. Her body was left at a first-aid station in Taraz. She has no information at all about her three brothers who were left behind in Russia.

Pelagia had no contact with the homeland or her brothers who had remained in the USSR at the outbreak of the Soviet-German war.

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Copyright: Borys family

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