Volunteer Jadwiga Bałajewicz, born in 1913, civilian occupation – nurse; I worked at the military hospital in Lwów as a massage therapist.
On 13 September 1939, I was ordered by Colonel Siwicki from the 6th District Hospital to go to the village of Winniki near Lwów. There, I voluntary reported to a small group of female blood donors, and we would give our blood to seriously wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Our stay there was short, for after only four days we were transferred to the vicinity of Grodno, where we camped by the Biały Lake. We continued to work at the site until 27 September 1939. During the night from 27 to 28 September, the Soviets surrounded our hiding place and captured all 254 of us, including forty women. We were immediately separated and placed in the prison in Grodno, where they kept us until 15 November. On 16 November, they transferred us to the prison in Kharkiv, and it was there that they started to take their revenge on us in earnest. We were beaten and shot at during interrogations; I still have a weal on my breast that was made by a Soviet rifle butt. Eleven of us women were kept in Kharkiv until 18 March 1940. From Kharkiv, they took us – a large number of women – to the Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Ural, to the prison in Nizhnyaya Tura, where after five days all of us were classified as political prisoners under Soviet statute 64 and received twelve-year sentences.
Nizhnyaya Tura will forever remain in my memory – I had to survive naked and barefoot, with hardly any food, while toiling day and night: “na stanku ” during the day, among others loading and unloading railway wagons. On 15 February 1941, they took us two from Nizhnyaya Tura to a large forced labor camp in Ivdel. On the day of our arrival in Ivdel we were forced to prepare a mud hut for ourselves. Although waterlogged and damp, it was the only place where we could rest for even a while. I worked felling trees. My hands were in a terrible state, covered with blisters and festering wounds caused by the continuous use of a heavy ax and saw. We were fed with nothing more than beetroot and radish; we all suffered stomach ailments, and one half of all prisoners died of hunger. No one even saw a doctor in the camp – there was a female nurse, but she had no drugs whatsoever.
I was released from the forced labor camp in Ivdel on 28 August 1941. We were given ten days’ food, 12 rubles for each day, and free railway tickets to Central Asia, to the city of Tashkent. When we arrived at our destination, there were a great many people there already, and we were forced to work illegally in order to survive.
We toiled and suffered in Tashkent throughout the autumn, until finally – on 27 February 1942 – the mobilization was declared, and I reported to the recruitment office on the same day. I was accepted and sent to Wriewskij [now Olmazor], where the headquarters was located. Yangiyul. I remained in Wriewskij for a short time, attending medical school and passing exams. On 24 March 1942, I left Russia and to date serve in the Women’s Auxiliary Service of the Polish Army.