Section leader Leokadia Budzyń, born on 3 March 1924 in the settlement of Halterowo, district of Równe, unmarried, a student.
In October 1939, I was evicted together with my parents and siblings from our landholding, and sent to the nearby village of Szubków, while on 10 February 1940 we were deported to Kotowalska.
This was in the Kotlas region of the Arkhangelsk Oblast. For the first three months, everyone aged 16 and above worked felling trees. We were forced to work immediately upon our arrival.
The housing conditions were intolerable. Seventeen families (70 – 80 people) had to live in a single barrack hall. There was only one cooker for all of us. We slept on the ground. During the night, bugs and cockroaches would interrupt our rest. People began dying. Soon, there were no children under two years of age.
In May 1940, everyone from our settlement was transferred to another village, where we were put to work processing wood. There were ninety families in the new settlement, a mix of military settlers and colonists from the region of Brody.
We continued to live in barracks, a few families to each. Now, we slept on so-called pallets. But we were still accompanied by bugs and cockroaches.
We labored from dawn till dusk, with a two-hour break for dinner. Everyone aged sixteen and over had to work. If you didn’t go to work even for a day, your family would be threatened with seizure of its weekly bread ration. And if this happened again, you would be taken to court and sentenced to prison.
Only those who were exempted by the doctor were allowed not to go to work. Our wages were pitiful, and in no way sufficient to purchase the quantity of bread to which we were entitled.
There was absolutely no possibility of buying wood for heating; in order to obtain firewood, we had to sell our last items of clothing. We were supervised by the NKVD, represented directly by the commandant and his militiamen. They made every effort to weaken our spirits, among others through numerous propaganda meetings and talks, but we deportees were so united and strong of heart that the Soviets enjoyed no success whatsoever. As we worked, our exhaustion increased, and instances of death became more common – but our spirits never faltered. Throughout my period of detention in the settlement, 15 percent of the original number died.
In September 1941 our Polish citizenship was officially recognized and, in spite of the difficulties that we were forced to face, we managed to leave in the direction of the newly forming Polish Army. After two months of travel we reached Kermine, where we were placed in a sovkhoz. I lived there for four months with my whole family. For me, this was the period of greatest deprivation.
On 30 March 1942, while still in the sovkhoz, my father enlisted in the Polish Army, whereas I, my mother, and my siblings left for Iran, where I joined the Women’s Auxiliary Service.