1. Personal data (name, surname, rank, age, occupation and civil status):
Second Lieutenant of the Reserve Franciszek Bełch, Field Post Office no. 160; 28 years old, a teacher by profession, married.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
I was arrested on 17 June 1940 in Włodzimierz Wołyński during a round-up of people registered to leave for territory occupied by German forces.
3. Name of the camp, prison, place of forced labor:
Komi Republic, Severnyj Zheleznodorozhny Forced Labor Camp [a group of forced labor camps administered by the Northern Railway Camp system], VII Subcamp.
4. Description of the camp, prison (grounds, buildings, living conditions, hygiene):
a) In the prison in Włodzimierz Wołyński I was kept in a ten-man cell with sixty other detainees. We could wash neither ourselves nor our clothes, and the place was infested with lice.
b) While in the labor camp, in August and September we lived in shacks covered with moss, without any beds or beddings; no effort was made to eliminate the lice. The barracks were full of bugs, there were no beds or bedlinen, and we had to sleep on pallets made from logs.
5. Social composition of POWs, prisoners, deportees (nationality, category of crimes, intellectual and moral level, mutual relations, etc.):
The prison housed Polish citizens (of Polish nationality – 40 percent, of Belorussian and Ukrainian – 20 percent, and of Jewish origin – 40 percent). Nearly all of us were charged with political crimes.
Later, when we were in the labor camp, they mixed us with common criminals – Soviet citizens (bandits, thieves, profiteers) – and a smaller number of “politicals”. Our coexistence with the Soviet criminals was really bad (thefts, fights; they even committed a few murders).
6. Life in the camp, prison (the course of an average day, working conditions, quotas and norms, wages, food, clothing, social and cultural life, etc.):
Since the prison was overcrowded, we would usually have to relieve ourselves directly in the cell. Our sole occupation was killing lice. In the labor camp, we worked twelve hours a day in winter, and fourteen hours a day in summer. When war broke out with the Germans, our working time was extended to seventeen hours. We toiled on the construction of railways and in dense forests, irrespective of the weather conditions – even when the temperature dropped to minus 54 degrees. The full norm for healthy category “A” prisoners required carting away 4.5 cubic meters of sand to a distance of 50 meters. Those who were unable to carry out more than 30 percent of the norm would be locked up for the night in an unheated punishment cell. The next day they would be rushed to work, receiving only 30 decagrams of bread and two helpings of watery soup. Those who could not fulfill the quota were refused both clothes and footwear. Since we spent most of the day at work, we had practically no time for cultural life or leisure. It was impossible (and indeed forbidden) to read newspapers or listen to war news over the radio.
7. Attitude of the authorities, NKVD towards Poles (methods of interrogation, torture, punishments, Communist propaganda, information about Poland, etc.):
During interrogations the NKVD tried to convince me that the Communist system is superior in every aspect to all others. I encountered the same propaganda in the labor camp. Poland was considered as a country of low culture, governed by the aristocratic class (the so-called lords or masters).
8. Medical care, hospitals, mortality rate (provide the surnames of those who perished):
The “doctors” were in actual fact insufficiently qualified paramedics, who additionally had no medical supplies – no aspirin, no iodine, and no cotton tampons. People would be sent to hospital in the terminal stages of disease. Those who had a temperature under 38 degrees were forced to go to work. In the labor colony, which numbered some six hundred people, one or two prisoners would die daily of extreme exhaustion and insufficient nutrition.
I know that in colony no. 37 in the Komi Republic, at road section (km) 84, one Cezary Cięgotura from Inowrocław, Pakowska Street 31, died in the first days of September 1940.
9. Was it at all possible to keep in touch with the home country and your family? If yes, then what contacts were permitted?
I had no contact with my family in Poland.
10. When were you released and how did you get through to the Polish army?
I was released on the basis of the amnesty on 2 September 1941, but they actually let me go only a few days later, on 9 September. The camp authorities did not inform me of the whereabouts of the newly forming Polish Army; I received the necessary directions in Kotlas, in the course of my journey. Due to overcrowding, the voyage by rail to Totskoye was arduous and long, lasting three weeks. I enlisted in the Polish Army on 2 October 1941.
Official stamp, 16 March 1943
Note! I was tried in absentia by a so-called troika, and sentenced to three years of labor camp.