1. Corporal Stanisław Bronowicki, born in 1908, unmarried, a farmer by occupation.
2. I was arrested by the Soviet authorities in February 1941 and detained for two months in the prison in Równe. From there I was transferred to the prison in Kiev. I spent two months there.
3. The conditions were very difficult, especially as we were interrogated regularly. I was considered as a Polish spy – because I couldn’t convince them that I wasn’t. They would lock me up in the punishment cell, knee-deep in water, and keep me there for as many as four days; I was also beaten and tortured in other ways. After two months in Kiev, I was taken back to Poland, to the gaol in Zdołbunów, where I was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment. I spent six months there, whereafter they transferred me to the USSR, to the township of Ovruch near Zhytomyr, where I was forced to work on the construction of the airport. Working conditions were very difficult. We carted sand (earth) in wheelbarrows over a distance of some 400 meters, toiling for twelve hours a day. The quota was high: you had to wheel off 120 wheelbarrows loaded with thickly compressed earth. Since carrying out the norm was next to impossible, I would receive 200 grams of bread and, twice daily, half a liter of thin, watery soup.
4. Outbreak of the Soviet-German war. We were transferred to Novosibirsk, where we were stopped for four days and distributed between various forced labor camps. I was sent to the Ural, Sverdlovsk Oblast, to a township the name of which I have forgotten. There I was employed as a carpenter to build barracks. We worked for twelve hours a day. The food was bad – we received 200 grams of bread per day, one half liter of boiled water in the morning, a piece of fish and some water for dinner, and the same for supper.
The medical care was good, those who fell ill were treated and looked after.
We spent some four weeks in the Ural, and that is where news of the amnesty reached us.
I left the Sverdlovsk Oblast to join the Polish Army on 19 September 1941.