1. Personal data:
Stefan Frelka, son of Franciszek and Julianna née Grzyl, born on 16 December in the village of Skrzetusz, Oborniki district, Poznań voivodeship. I worked as a State Police Inspector, and in 1939 I served at the State Police station in Prozorki, Dzisna district, Wilno voivodeship. Now I am a military police sergeant.
2 Date and circumstances of arrest:
From 20 September 1939, I was in Latvia as an internee. Recently I was in the farm in Lapaini, Lugazi commune, Valka district. I was arrested on 20 August 1940 by Latvian police and remanded in custody in Valka. On the following day, I and twelve other internees from Valka were taken to the camp in Ulbroka where the Soviet authorities set up a concentration camp to which Polish internees arrested in Latvia were brought.
On 2 September 1940 trucks arrived in the camp. We were loaded onto trucks in a standing position. It was such a tight squeeze that it was impossible to move. This is how I was brought to the train station, the name of which I don’t remember. There was a train of freight cars. The trucks drove up to the train and we were loaded into the cars, from 36 to 40 people per car. The cars weighed 15 tons and less. When the train was loaded, and the task had to be carried out with speed and efficiency, the cars were locked up. Soviet soldiers were very harsh in their treatment of the internees, some of whom were brutally shoved around. On 5 September 1940, the whole transport arrived in the camp in Kozelsk.
3. Name of the camp:
The camp in Kozielsk: from 5 September 1940 to 15 May 1941.
On 15 May 1941, I was taken in a transport of over one thousand people to Murmansk. After arriving there on 22 May, we were placed in a camp twelve kilometers away from Murmansk, only to be transferred back, on 3 June, to the camp in Murmansk, in the vicinity of the harbor. On 5 June, we boarded a ship and sailed to Ponoy in the Kola Peninsula. Our ship arrived in Ponoy on 12 June. On 17 June it was unloaded and we were placed in the field, that is in some swampy area, two kilometers away from Ponoy. Thin planks, which were only now brought over from the ship, were used to build tent frames over which we pulled tent canvas. Finally, after a few days of staying there in the open air, without being properly fed, we were accommodated in the newly built tents, from 100 to 200 people per tent. It was only at this point that we set up the camp proper. All of us were forcibly marched to work, also in rain and all kinds of bad weather. We worked twelve hours a day. The time spent assembling and marching didn’t count towards working time. All of this amounted to between twelve and sixteen hours a day. Along with a group of about five hundred people I was sent from the camp in Ponoy, after it was partly organized, to another camp which, located about twelve kilometers in a straight line away from Ponoy, was just being set up. We were again left in the open air, in the swampy area. Relying on our own resources, we set up tent poles and covered them with canvas. The tents served as our home until 13 July 1941. On 14 July 1941, we were loaded onto a ship called "Uzbezkin" and taken to the camp in Arkhangelsk. The camp was situated near the train station. We were there until 22 July 1941. That day we were loaded into a train and transported to Vladimir, from where we marched to a monastery in Suzdal. In Suzdal the whole transport was accomodated on the floors in the monastery buildings.
4. Description of the camp:
The camp in Kozelsk was set up in the buildings and churches of a monastery. Living and hygienic conditions were satisfactory.
The camps in Murmansk (I and II) and in Ponoy on the Kola Peninsula were set up in a swampy area. We were accommodated in tents. Because of the congestion in the tents, our situation was very difficult. The hygienic conditions were completely substandard. We didn’t have any mattresses or straw. There was no bedding at all.
5. Composition of prisoners-of-war, prisoners, exiles:
In the camp in Kozelsk, there were over two thousand rank-and-file policemen, about one thousand rank-and-file military policemen and border guards, several dozen civilians – civil servants – and about one and a half thousand officers. All of them were Polish. There were no criminals. The intellectual level was normal and we were on good terms with each other.
6. Life in the camp:
In Kozelsk we worked mostly within the campground. On rare occasions we did some work outside, clearing roads of snow and dragging wood out of the bushes to heat the buildings in which we were lodged. Fuel was supplied very rarely and there was always very little of it. We weren’t paid for our work and the food they gave us was very poor. It lacked fat and people had to live on 800 grams of bread a day. Our clothes were in a very bad state. Patching them together was part of our effort to survive. Our mutual relations were good, but we were deprived of any form of cultural life. All the movies and newspapers to which we were given access were designed to spread communist propaganda, as were the lectures organized by the NKVD. The lectures were also used to curse the English whom the Soviets blamed for the outbreak of both wars, in 1914 and in 1939. The Germans, by contrast, were praised for the policy they pursued.
7. The NKVD’s attitude towards Poles:
Within the campgrounds the NKVD functionaries were quite civil in their treatment of Poles, but their conduct during interrogations, held outside the camp, in the buildings in which they were quartered and which were enclosed by high, impenetrable walls, was brutal. They behaved in a violent way, pounding the table and yelling threats and abuse at interrogatees. Those who refused to testify the way they wanted weren’t given the letters their families had sent them, although prisoners were sometimes shown that such letters actually existed. People who still had their families in Poland were threatened to have their relatives deported to Siberia if they failed to testify the way the interrogators expected them to. The Soviets ridiculed our country, repeating with contempt that there was no point in thinking about Poland because it would never exist again. We were called the "bourgeois" and accused of exploiting the working class.
Right upon our arrival in the camps in Murmansk and in the Kola Peninsula we were told that we were prisoners and that we were required to comply with the regulations they had just given us. We were treated quite harshly, like prisoners. The food in the Kola Peninsula was very poor and irregular. Sometimes they gave us soup and 85 grams of bread a day. On such occasions we were told that food provisions couldn’t be supplied to the camp because of the outbreak of the war.
8. Medical assistance, hospitals, mortality rate:
In Kozelsk there was a camp hospital and the medical assistance we received there was satisfactory. There were some deaths but I didn’t know those who died. In the camp in Kozelsk two people committed suicide – a captain and a policeman. The names of neither of them are known to me. In the camps in Murmansk and in the Kola Peninsula, medical assistance was very poor. There were no medicines, although there were some Polish doctors.
9. What, if any, was your contact with the home country and your family?
From November 1940 to April 1941, we were allowed to write one letter a month. Special vouchers were issued for this purpose. Every month I made use of the voucher, writing a letter to my family, but throughout the time I spent in the camps I didn’t receive a single letter from my loved ones. My family was deported to Kazakhstan. They are still there. I had no contact with my family who remained in Poland, although I once wrote a letter to my mother in Poznań voivodeship.
10. When were you released and how did you manage to join the army?
On 4 September 1941, I was released from the camp in Suzdal; all of the inmates were sent to the train station in Vladimir and transported to Tatishchevo where the 5th Infantry Division was being formed. There I joined the 14th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Infantry Division, and I have been in the army ever since.