Gulag

Upon arrival, the situation usually worsened. Many of the exiles had been lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, and merchants, accustomed to living in cities or towns of relative sophistication. By contrast, an archival report, dated December 1941, describes exiles from the “new” western territories living in overcrowded barracks: “The buildings are dirty, as a result of which there is a high incidence of disease and death, especially among children . . . most exiles have no warm clothes and are unused to cold weather.”¹⁵

The suffering, in the months and years that followed, only grew, as one unusual set of records testifies. After the war, what was then the Polish government-in-exile commissioned and preserved a collection of children’s “memoirs” of the deportations. They illustrate, better than any adult account could, both the culture shock and the physical deprivation experienced by the deportees. One Polish boy, age thirteen at the time of his “arrest,” wrote the following account of his months in deportation:

There was nothing to eat. People ate nettle and swelled up from it and they left for the other world. They rushed us to the Russian school compulsively because they didn’t give bread when you didn’t go to school. They taught us not to pray to God that there is no God and when after the lesson was over we all got up and started praying, then the commander of the settlement locked me up in the tyurma [prison]. ¹⁶

Other children’s stories reflect their parents’ trauma. “Mama wanted to take her own life and ours so as not to live in such torment, but when I told Mama that I want to see Dad and I want to return to Poland, Mama’s spirit rose again,” wrote another boy, age eight at the time of his arrest.¹⁷ But not all women’s spirits did rise again. Another child, age fourteen at the time of his deportation, described his mother’s attempted suicide:

Mommy came to the barracks, took a rope, a little bread, and went into the woods. I held my Mommy back in her grief she hit me with the rope and went away. A few hours later they found Mommy on a spruce tree, Mommy had a rope around her neck. Under the tree stood some girls, Mommy thought it was my sisters and wanted to say something but the girls raised up a rumpus to the commandant who had taken an axe in his belt and he chopped down the spruce . . . Mommy already crazy grabbed the commandant’s axe and struck him in the back, the commandant fell to the floor . . .

On the next day they took Mommy to a jail 200 miles away from me. I understood that I had to work and I continued to haul timber. I had a horse that was falling over together with me. I hauled timber for one month and then I got sick and could not work. The commandant notified the seller that he should not give us bread but the seller had an understanding for children and he gave us bread secretly . . . soon Mommy came from jail her feet frozen her face wrinkled ...¹⁸

But not all mothers survived either—as another child wrote: