Pelagia Borys, 3rd (Training) Transport Company, 2nd Platoon, Women’s Auxiliary Service.
Volunteer Pelagia Borys, born on 20 August 1920 in the village of Kąty, district of Łomża, Warsaw voivodeship. Civilian occupation: lives with her parents.
I was deported to Russia together with my family on 20 June 1941. The Soviets sent us to the Barnaul Oblast, to the region of Shipunovo train station, where there was a sovkhoz with a third degree of confinement. We worked at haying. The sovkhoz was pleasantly located on hilly, treeless ground, surrounded by meadows and fields, but the living conditions were very difficult, terrible in fact. In order to survive, you had to sell your clothes. The rules of hygiene were not really observed. I didn’t hear anything about people dying in our sovkhoz or in the locality, for we were there briefly – the amnesty was soon announced. The prisoners in our sovkhoz were people who had lived along the eastern Polish border and also rich farmers, who had somehow fallen foul of the Soviet government. It was obligatory to fulfill two quotas, but the remuneration was poor – you would not even make enough to survive. Neither could we afford new clothes, especially as circumstances had forced us to sell those which we had taken from home.
The attitude of the Soviet authorities was unwaveringly hostile.
There was absolutely no medical care and no hospitals. After the amnesty was announced, we left Siberia and traveled south; my mother died along the way. Her body was left at a first-aid station in Taraz. I have no information at all about my three brothers who were left behind in Russia.
I had no contact with the homeland or my brothers who had remained there right until the outbreak of the Soviet-German war.