back...Unknown excerpts from memoirs of Irena Wołyniak exiled to Siberia as a result of USSR’s aggression

As a result of mass deportations of the Polish population following the aggression of the USSR, many Polish families were sent to Siberia. Among them were those closest to the heart of Stanisław Siedlecki, a senator of the Second Polish Republic, and one of the most prominent representatives of the Promethean movement. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, in the first half of 1940 Irena Siedlecka (married to Wołyniak) was exiled with her sister and ailing mother to Siberia. She was then evacuated via Uzbekistan to Iran, and from there to India. After the war, she settled permanently in Australia.

[...]

My war memories, contrary to expectations, do not consist of sounds of airplanes and artillery blasts, nor is there any occasion where I was cramped in an air shelter. I have not known a single air shelter and although I was no stranger to the sounds of sirens and falling bombs, my memory chambers are filled to the brim with more prosaic pictures of barracks and people crowding on the Siberian grass sleeping outdoors, or crouching in the Iranian desert sand under meagre tents that hardly covered our heads, migrating people forcibly taken from their homes, crowded in the dirty wagon floor of goods trains, travelling for days on end to an unknown destination, although Polish history would point in the direction of Siberia.

We arrived after two long weeks at a camp situated in the middle of immense Siberian forests, near the village of Asino, not far from Tomsk in the Novosibirskaya province, as we found out later. The sight of the wooden barracks recently vacated by Russian prisoners, at first arose some curiosity.

People were coming in to examine their new quarters and there was a lot of animated talking at the sight of crowded quarters with double bunks lining the walls. One of my clearest memories is a moment in one of those old barracks, when we were examining our new surroundings. I looked at the bits of dirty-pink walls that were visible between the timbers of the bunks and thought for a moment I must have had a fit of dizziness, because I saw the walls passing before my eyes in a constant wave of slow movement. However, the others were subject to a similar “delusion”, until someone, more realistically exclaimed, “Look at the bed bugs, the walls are covered with them! Let’s get out quick before they get to our things.”

[...]

My mother, sister and I were lucky enough to have been allocated a place in a brand-new barrack, which was just as well, as it already began to snow. The summer lasted barely from June to September. We were deported from Poland on the day of Saints Peter and Paul, at the end of June. The buildings we were to live in were very simple wooden structures, the walls made of two layers of pine planks, with the space in between filled with sawdust. Ingenious substitute for double brick and cosily warm in the horrific Siberian winter, when the temperature outside reached minus 50 degrees Celsius and when minus 25 degrees Celsius on a windless day seemed like a spring day.

[...]

The room in which we lived had six bunks. By a bunk I mean a wide, wooden plank supported on strips of crossed over wood for legs. These were to serve us as beds. No other furniture was either provided or necessary. Those of us who had any type of bedding were lucky. It served us for a mattress as well as a cover. Others slept on raw wooden surface and covered themselves with their coats. We shared a room with our friend, Elisabeth and her son and with a boy about 15 or 16. Later he changed places with a young woman of about 20, who was deported after having been imprisoned in Poland for crimes unknown and non-existent. She had no luggage. Her only possessions were the clothes she was taken in and she shivered every night under her light winter coat.

[...]

At the outset of our camp life, an officer of NKVD would gather all of us outside on the grass for a lecture. First, he informed us of our situation and told us how grateful we must be to the gracious comrade Stalin, our benefactor, for providing a home for us — in the vastness of Siberia — whilst the Germans did not bother to repatriate us. In return for such “generosity”, we were obliged to pay back the cost of food and transportation incurred on the journey. [...]