1. Personal data:
Henryk Jakubik, born in 1911, Polish, Roman Catholic, married.
2. Date and circumstances of being taken prisoner:
I was taken prisoner by the Soviets, together with a gendarmerie platoon, on 22 September 1939 in the vicinity of Włodzimierz Wołyński.
3. POW camps:
Shepetivka, Hoszcza, Korzec, Hołownica, Starobilsk.
4. Cases of people who were murdered during their march:
We went from Shepetivka to Hoszcza on foot. Due to exhaustion and poor nutrition this march was very taxing. A lot of people died from exhaustion on the way. I don’t remember the surnames of the deceased. Following the outbreak of the war with the Germans we were promptly evacuated. We were marched on foot from Hołownica to Zhytomyr, in a great hurry. During this march the Soviet escort treated us in a very brutal manner. Those who fell behind due to weariness were compelled to go on by being beaten with rifle butts. We were forced to march day and night. The food was very bad. In Zhytomyr we were loaded onto wagons, 96 people per each. People fainted because the wagons were extremely cramped and stuffy and we didn’t have anything to drink. The escort didn’t pay any heed to that – on the contrary, they gave us 400 grams of bread per person and some salty, half-rotten fish in order to make our thirst more acute.
5. Life in the POW camp:
The POW camp in Starobilsk was set up in a former Orthodox monastery. It was terribly cramped. There wasn’t any hygiene or medical assistance. The filth resulted in a great plague of bugs and lice. We weren’t issued clean underwear at all, and what was worse we were forbidden to wash our own. We had to do it by stealth. Generally, in Starobilsk we were treated as ordinary prisoners. The cells were isolated one from another, so we couldn’t have any contact. Since we were being treated as prisoners, we weren’t used for forced labor. Only a small number of prisoners had to work at the airport. These prisoners were completely separated from us. In the camps in Hoszcza, Korzec and Hołownica we were forced to work in the stone quarries and at road and bridge construction sites. It was difficult to meet the prescribed work quotas. For failure to fill the quota we had our otherwise very small food rations diminished. For failure to meet the quota for a longer period of time we were incarcerated in makeshift jails, which were very restrictive.
In the middle of August, after the signing of the Polish-Soviet agreement, I was released from the POW camp and on 24 August 1941 I joined the Polish army, that is, the 6th Infantry Division in Totskoye.
Official stamp, 16 March 1943