I was born on 5 December1924 in Zadnieszówka (Podwołoczyska), Ternopol voivodship, as the daughter of Stefan and Agafia Lech. My father was a senior constable of the State Police in Bogdanówka.

 

After the invasion by the Red Army on 17 September 1939, my father went to Ternopol for a meeting and together with other policemen was arrested. On 21 September, we received a message from friends that thousands of policemen will be marched on the road from Ternopol through the village of Kamionki-Bogdanówka to Podwołoczyk. My mother, two brothers, and an older sister took some food and money and ran to say goodbye to my father. I was not home, but when I found out, I ran to Kamionki and saw my father in the convoy. I called out to him and my father saw me, waved his hand and cried out, “Goodbye.”

 

After returning home, my mother put some underwear, shoes, food in a backpack, and rode a bike to catch up with the entire column in Podwołoczyski. After begging a soldier, he finally took the backpack and handed it to my father. Along with other police officers, he was deported to the camp in Ostaszków. In January or February 1940, we received one postcard from our father with the news that he was alive, and with the address of Ostaszków, polowoj jaszczyk 37. That was the last message.

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On 13 April 1940, we were awakened with violent banging on the door. Soldiers with rifles, an NKVD officer, a local Ukrainian, and a neighbor Jew, entered the apartment. The Jewish man was rich and friendly to us, but already had a red wristband on his sleeve. The officer said we were going to join our father and we had to leave after they searched the apartment.

 

We were allowed to take personal documents, some food, and clothes. Mother was a hero - she didn't lose her head. Despite resistance, she packed as much food as possible, as well as clothes (this saved our lives after deportation to Kazakhstan, because we exchanged these for a piece of bread).

 

Under the soldier's guard, my mother milked a cow, and we poured milk into bottles. There were small children in the cattle wagon on the train, who could use this milk very much. Then my mother and her four children were told to leave. The oldest sister was 17, I was 15, the younger brother was 13 and the youngest was 9 years old.

 

We were taken to the railway station in Podwołoczyski, where a goods train waited. They loaded us like animals into barred carriages, mostly women with young children. Crying, everyone crowded, terrible conditions, lack of water, the toilet was a hole cut in the floor. Next to the wagon stood our dog Spitz, who ran behind the cart for 10 km to the train station and howled a lot. My mother asked the officer to take him. The officer stroked him and took him with him. After three days, the train started, and we said goodbye to Poland, cousins and friends standing on the platform. After three days of riding, we got water to drink and that was the case throughout the trip. Every few days, during a longer stopover, two people from the wagon brought water under guard.

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After two weeks of this nightmarish journey, we arrived at the Petuchowo – North Kazakhstan station on 26 April. We were loaded into open trucks and driven deep into the steppes for 90 km to Ksil-Askerowsky – a sheep-raising collective farm, in the Prisysky region of Petropavlovsky Oblast. Several families, including mine, were housed in a single room, where from morning to night the head of the collective farm and the party faithful were in office. They said the crying of sleepless children disturbed them at work, so they put together a hut of birches and branches in the forest and threw us out there.

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After the spring melt, it was very wet, and the mosquito swarms were particularly difficult for the children. Everyone rebelled and we did not go to the huts in the forest. For a few nights we stayed under the open sky, and it was good that it wasn't raining. After our rebellion, they helped us build earth dwellings from the turf and that is where we lived until winter. We were stuffed like herring; there was only room for a bunk to sleep. We cooked food outside.

 

We all worked except small children, for 200 grams of bread each. First, we worked with the grazing sheep. My sister and Iwere taken a few kilometers into the steppe where there were herds of sheep and we were not allowed to confuse them. It was not easy because the sheep were running back to the lambs and mixing. The Kazaks shouted at us for being responsible for the fallen lambs. The Kazakhs lived in the same room with us. My sister and I slept on the bunk, and my father, mother and two children slept on the floor. We were scavenged with lice, and at night there were thousands of bedbugs. We had nothing to eat. The Kazakhs gave us some milk. The water was drawn from the Łozyn river, where the sheep drank, and various critters were swimming in it.

 

One time, a terrible snowstorm, a bouran, broke, so that nothing could be seen two steps ahead of you. All the Kazakhs ran to the stables to save the sheep and lambs from cold and hunger (2,000 of them). My sister decided: we're running away! She took the comforter on her back, I took the pillow, and we went into the steppe. but the world was not visible! We walked for a very long time, and it turned out that we returned to the hut. We lost orientation in this snowstorm and it was good that no one saw us, so we went in a different direction. We wandered in the snow, our legs soaked, we fell from losing our strength. At some point, we heard someone calling to us. A “telegon” drove up, which carried milk to the farm where our family was. It was an Iranian, also in exile. He felt very sorry for us and made us sit on the wagon and so we got back like snowmen in the snow, everything froze on us. In the morning, the commandant came with a whip and wanted to beat us, but everyone stood up for us, that we have nothing to put on our feet except those soaked half-shoes, and that we will go to any other work on the spot.

 

With the arrival of spring, work began in the field from dawn to night, everyone worked on planting, sowing and weeding. You had to work out the norm to get 200 grams of bread. In the summer, we worked on harvesting hay and grain.

 

It was a short summer; temperatures were 40 degrees and more. In four months, everything grew and was ripe. In the month of September, the harvest had to be completed, because in October it was already snowing and very often covered the un-mowed grain.

 

I got a cart with a pair of oxen and followed the combine harvester, which was pouring grain into the cart and then I would drive them to the shed. It was necessary to quickly return before the harvester rounded the field. The oxen didn’t want to listen to me. I could not deal with them, and I was constantly late with the return, and I had to listen to the curses of the combine driver.

 

Helen's mother and sister sheared the sheep: one held, the other shaved. My brother Zbyszek drove the grain to the granary and fell so unfortunately that the car ran over his leg. They drove him to a hospital 30 km away, and my sister carried him from the wagon on her back. They put a cast on his leg and he stayed there for two weeks. Once a week, the postman rode a horse-drawn carriage for the post office and flour to the mill; he brought Zbyszek back to us. For a while, he could not work until his leg healed, so he received only 200 g of bread. After recovering, he was assigned to the hay. He was 14 years old, but he looked 18, so they gave him to hard work, handing him whole hay bales to add to the heap with a pitchfork. He got up at dawn, ate some soup and a piece of bread, and worked until the evening. Sometimes the Russians gave him something to eat. There were some good people, who were descendants of exiles, so they felt sorry for us and taught us how to steal a handful of wheat to save ourselves from hunger.

 

With the onset of winter (1940/41), we were stuffed with several families into earth dwellings that had a stove. The roof was covered with turf from the branches and during the storm the snow would pour inside. The frost reached minus 40 and minus 50 degrees. They gave us permission to cut down a tree in the woods that covered up to the roof. Everyone who had something warm to wear went to dig up the snow and sawed some of the tree. It was frozen and wet and was hard to burn. Water froze in buckets, we suffered hunger, and insects devoured us. The bread was not there for several months, because no one worked in such frosts. All work ceased. At Christmas we had a handful of bran and there was nothing to even share.

 

Zbyszek from overwork and exhaustion got night blindness. He would come home before the sun went down, but when he worked far away and didn't make it, he was brought by one of the workers because he could not see how to get back.

 

Mother went with some of the exiles to the Kazakhs and exchanged clothes for some butter and flour. I went to the office and told them that my brother could not work, and that he was a good worker, the manager gave me a ration card to the warehouse where I got some liver and a piece of slimy scum and half a kilo of tallow. After three weeks, his health improved. He then worked on bathing sheep in a creolin that were suffering from tuberculosis.

 

On 17 December 1940, my sister Helena gave birth to a son, and his name was Mark. How this child survived in such poverty, cold, and hunger, it is difficult to imagine today. The whole family and the inhabitants of the earth dwelling helped this child to save it from freezing and starvation. The Russian woman who delivered this baby brought some good milk. This baby was very sick, but thank God he survived this exile, returned to Poland, graduated and has lived to see his grandchildren.

 

Helena's sister's husband was arrested and sent to a heavy labour camp in Karaganda. They arrested three, but after a year, by some miracle, only her husband came back to us. He was a skeleton, he had lost his voice, he did not look human. After a few months, he slowly recovered. After some time, he was conscripted into the Kościuszko Army. He didn't return to his wife; he found another companion.

 

After going through severe frosts in the winter of 1940/41, my mother and a second Polish woman, our neighbor before the war, took a sled with some of father's belongings and went to a kolkhoz 30 km away. There was no road, snow was up to the knees, and there were wolves in the undergrowth. They got to the buildings by evening, barely alive. Merciful, good people gave them food and they stayed overnight in warm huts. After exchanging these things for “products”, heated and fed, they went back, and we prayed that they would return happily and not freeze in the steppe. After three days of nightmare hiking, in the evening, both appeared barely alive, frozen like icicles, but happy that they managed to get some food. We waited for spring and the work in the field and in the forest began again.

 

In 1941, we learned of the ‘amnesty’ and we moved to Kołchoz Trojck in the Presnowski region. The living conditions were less tragic there. We lived with Russians, and helped them the garden, harvesting hay for cows, culturing the forest – preparing fuel for the long winter, which lasted almost seven months. I also worked on grain harvesting and threshing in winter. Every day my sister and I walked a few kilometers to the fields to work, and at noon we got soup, 200 gr. of bread and a piece of mutton.

 

In the evening, we came home by the road next to the forest. We came out of the corner and saw that on the edge of the forest by the road, maybe 50 m from us, a wolf was sitting. It was difficult to see it and distinguish it from the grasses and shrubs. Without turning our backs, we began to slowly retreat and pray. I do not know how long it took, every minute was an age. We retreated, maybe 40 steps, and we saw the wolf stand up, look around and go into the woods. We waited for other people to join us; we happily came home.

 

Between 1942 and 1945, the war consumed many supplies. The army was taking the grain and cattle. There was terrible hunger. Nothing had grown in the field yet, so nothing could be stolen. Many people died of hunger, including Gieroj Soyuza’s family - a mother and six children. They died of hunger and cold. When Gieroj came on holiday, he wanted to kill those in power who had everything they needed for life for themselves.

 

In 1942, a terrible winter came, we did not receive the grain we had earned because the army was transporting everything. I used to go out with my mother or my sister to the steppe, where there were piles of straw. In a place unearthed from the snow, we found chaff that we took in our hands and blew them out. After a few hours, several handfuls of different grains and wild weeds were collected - several grains, and the blackest Lebioda grains dark as carbon. It was dusk and it was time to go back to make a meal before night. After packing a bag, we saw that wolves were coming out of the undergrowth, about 100 meters away. There were five, maybe eight, of them. We were overwhelmed by fear, we began to pray loudly and very slowly moved away. I guess God’s grace had custody of us, the wolves stood still and probably were not hungry, and we happily came home. Mother cooked the harvested grain in a small amount of water and roasted it in a pan. Black it was like coal and grinded in the teeth, but a little hunger was satisfied.

 

In the spring, Zbyszek worked on the sowing of fields, he rode on a seed drill with a Russian girl. Coming near the forest, the girl jumped from the seed drill and buried wheat bags in the ground. That's how they hid a few bags, but you could not take them out. After sowing this field, my mother and the mother of this girl went to the woods. They cut the dry grass, found the marked storage compartment, shared the bags wrapped in dry grass, and secretly, returned home. The Russian grinded wheat for groats or thick flour. It saved us from starvation.

 

My younger brother Wladzio grazed sheep for a slice of bread. Weakened from hunger, he fell asleep. The sheep ran around the undergrowth, then we were all looking for the wolves not to get to them. There were lambs in the herd, and he saw them sucking the sheep and he had the idea to suck it himself. Sheep's milk, oily and nutritious, boosted his strength.

 

Mother, saving us from starving death, suffered very much, was all swollen, because she gave every little bit of food to us. Summer came, and mother collected wild strawberries in the steppe and I brought a handful of stolen wheat from work - this allowed us to survive.

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Zbyszek was employed in a horse farm. The conditions were better there. He received half a kg of bread, soup and some cooked mutton. He rode a horse around a herd grazing in the steppe and made sure the wolves did not roam nearby. At noon, he drove them to the watering hole at a nearby lake. In winter it was worse, the horses grazed in the steppe digging up the grass with their hooves. Packs of wolves approached the herd, and then the two of them tapped some irons, burned fires, and made noises to chase them away. They drove the horses to the stables for the night and took turns guarding them, riding around the stables. He worked there until his appointment to the army, at the age of 17. He was wounded twice but survived the war.

 

General Anders, forming an army in the southern USSR, demanded the release of 16,000 Polish officers (who were already murdered in Katyn, Starobielsk and Ostaszków). Stalin's answer was that everyone was already released and must have fled abroad, probably to Manchuria. The General did not comply with Russian orders demanding that the Polish Army be sent to the front and instead evacuated the army to Persia (now Iran).

 

We did not hear about the formation of the Polish army. After that, the repression began. Polish citizenship was taken from us, and they wanted to force us to adopt Russian citizenship. At night, they gathered all the men, and beat them up. Te women locked them in a cell, but no one signed, to accept Russian citizenship. The Kościuszko Army began to be organized, and all the men were conscripted into that army.

 

In the winter, the son of our neighbor Olek died of tuberculosis at the age of 16. He had caught a cold while working in the woods. Having no medication and hunger led to his death. There was nothing to make a coffin out of. My mother gave them the boards from our bunk. Together they made a wretched box and drove him on a sled to the cemetery. The ground was deeply frozen, and they had difficulty digging a hole with the help of a pick and a crowbar, which the Russians lent them. We prayed, then covered the coffin with permafrost and snow, so it remained in the ‘inhuman’ ground. In the spring, we corrected the grave so that hungry dogs would not dig it up.

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In 1944, I contracted malaria. There was no cure. In the spring, the steppe bloomed beautifully like a carpet with various flowers. My mother collected wormwood and matrices. After brewing, I drank these herbs, but they didn't help much. At first, I had terrible chills, it was throwing me around like a ball, and then a temperature of 40 degrees. I had these attacks twice a day. In winter, the disease stopped but with the arrival of spring it attacked me again, I was close to death.

 

In the summer, when the grain was harvested, the Georgian army came to the collective farm, transporting grain and cattle. At the urging of the Russian woman we lived with, I gathered my courage and went to the Georgian military doctor. I told him who I was, that I had malaria and there are no medications. The doctor gave me a handful of quinine, but I was not to the Russians because he would not give them any. The medicine saved me.

 

The war ended, the joy was immense and the hope of returning to Poland. After the request of relevant documents, we were repatriated to Poland. In April 1946, we received the appropriate certificate. It turned out that 200 grams of bread, which we received at work, did not cover the settlement because “we had eaten too much”. Mother had to sell the last pillow and pay the missing amount.

 

In the first days of May 1946, we were transported to the District 50 km away and there we waited a whole week for a grouping, in some shed. Trucks, which drove the grain to the railway station, took a dozen or so people on top and, and we reached the Mamlutka railway station (Mamlut). We were stuffed in devastated warehouse buildings there. There were so many of us that it required a dozen wagons. At night, a storm broke and snow covered us in the buildings. People started getting sick, there was typhus. After two weeks of waiting, wagons were set up, that had previously transported horses. It's good that the snow melted and there was water in the ditch, because we had to scrape the dung, clean it and scrub it, because the stench was unbearable. After a week of drying and airing, we were loaded into those wagons.

 

On the way we received canned food, bread, dryers and milk in cans from the United Nations Refugee Association (UNRA). At our departure, some military personnel came, told us that we should not remember what had been wrong in the USSR, and that we are now friends. After checking the documents and singing the Russian anthem, the train started.

 

Full of hope and joy we drove through a beautiful Russian countryside, and through the Ural Mountains covered in bloomed crocuses and sassacks. In the mountains the train was going very slowly, and you could look closely. We passed the huge Volga River; the distant shores were not visible. On the journey we saw the destruction of the war, the villages razed to the ground and ruined cities. There were travel breaks, often waiting on a siding for two days, and joining our transport to other wagons.

 

In our transport there were 2,500 people. During a stopover, we received some soup and bread. We finally arrived in Brest. In the customs briefing, customs officers looked for gold, which no one had. During the stop, we were obliged to go to the baths, and our clothes were disinfected in a high-temperature chamber. (Only the Jews had gold, and they hid it well. In Russia they took over all the Polish committees, and they appropriated a great part of the help from UNRA.) From Brest, the train took us to Szczecin . We were terrified of the ruins we found there. At our request, the wagon in which we were going was attached to the passenger train that was going to Wrocław.

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On 7 July 1946, we stayed at 14 Paulińska Street and there we found friends from before the war, it was our neighbor's sister, with her husband and her children. They had a grocery store next door, invited us to dinner, gifted us food and advised us where to settle. This friend's son-in-law was transporting the displaced, and he drove us to Żernik. His relatives already lived there. In Żerniki there were still many houses where you could live, there was even some furniture.

 

My brother Zbyszek found out about our return, he came to us, joy and stories were endless. He had recovered from the wounds of war, and was in the rank of Lieutenant. In the committee of military settlers, he won a cow for us, she was our breadwinner for those times. My brother remained in the army, earned the rank of Colonel, and retired after years of service.

 

In Żerniki I met my future husband, who after liberation returned to Poland. He had been a soldier in the Armored Division of General Stanisław Maczek. During the war and German occupation, he lived with his family in Warsaw, where he was captured and transported to Germany. Also his mother Paulina and two brothers, Janek and Staszek, became victims of the captures, and were transported to Germany for forced labor. His father Władysław was arrested on 27 August 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising, in an action to displace the population of the Mokotów district. He died in a German labor camp and, after the war, at the request of his wife, was pronounced dead by the court.

At the end of the war, when the Allied bombings on German territory intensified, Antoni managed to escape to France. That's where he applied to the Polish army. He stood before the conscription committee on 16 March 1945 in the camp of the Polish Army No. 1 in the Bessières barracks in Paris. He arrived in the UK and arrived in the School and Distribution Camp on 24 March 1945, and was then assigned to the 16th Armoured Brigade. Just before the end of the war, Antoni began military training on a course on the Centaur tank. The course lasted from 7 May to 17 June 1945. After the war there was no future for Polish soldiers in Great Britain, Antoni decided to return to the ruined country. He was released from the Polish Armed Forces in the West on 14 December 1945. He returned to Poland by sea. He took advantage of the possibility of military settlement on the so-called ‘Reclaimed Lands’ and lived in Wrocław in a German house, which he then bought. That's where we moved in together and started a family. To this day, I live in this house.

 

After we were married, I took care of the house and raised the children, but fate was not kind to me. In 1954, after a serious cancer, my husband died. He was only 31 years old. I, a thirty-year-old woman, was left with three young children to raise. The oldest, Joasia, was 5 years old, my son Jurek was 4 years old, and the youngest Ania was 6 months old. There were very hard times for me. My further experience is a separate chapter.

 

We kept hoping that our father would return from Russian captivity. Unfortunately, we never saw my father again. In the 1990's, graves of murdered Polish officers were discovered in Katyn, Starobielsk and Mednoye-Ostaszków. Unfortunately, my mother did not live to see this moment. She died in 1978, she never knew her husband's fate, although when asked by her grandchildren "Grandmother, where is Grandpa?", she replied with sadness "Grandfather died in Katyn". She felt everything.

 

On 2 September 2000, I was at the opening of the cemetery in Mednoye, where my father's remains rest. We visited all the places of the torment: Katyń, Ostaszków-Twer, Mednoje. What I've been through cannot be described, you must survive. The cemeteries are very nice, built by a Polish company with the help of Russians. That's all we have left of our Polish heroes. Pilgrimages to Polish cemeteries are organized on the anniversary of the crime, where you can lay flowers, pray and light candles. I would like to go there again, but I don't know if it will happen, I'm already 77 years old and my health is getting worse. I pray for all the murdered, may they rest in peace.

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Source: a Katyn blog online

 

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Copyright: Banasiak family

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