ZOFIA KARPA

Zofia Karpa, born on 27 October 1924, Hermanów village, Lwów district and voivodeship.

The above-mentioned person was deported on 10 February 1940 to the USSR, Irkutsk Oblast, Nizhneudinsk region, pochtovoye otdeleniye [post office] in Ukar, Kordujka [?] hamlet. My entire family worked there. My sister, her husband, my father and I were making battens. The work quotas were terrible, impossible to fill. Those who managed to meet them received 600 grams of bread, and additionally a kilogram of oat groats twice a month. In summer my father and brother-in-law extracted resin, and I collected it. Life was better in summer, as we were able to meet the quotas and there were mushrooms and berries in the woods, and so we could live on them at the time. It was freezing cold in winter; I fell ill and lay in the hospital, but I didn’t receive any treatment due to the lack of medicaments.

Following the amnesty, we weren’t allowed to skip work or go anywhere until the end of the season, which ended on 20 September 1941. We had to hire a cart to the station in trade for our own things. On the way to Novosibirsk we didn’t have anything, no money, and only in Novosibirsk was there a Polish post that issued us a referral to the south, to Tashkent. We worked in a kolkhoz there. Our work consisted of carrying earth to a power plant construction site. We received 100 grams of bread and 300 grams of rice per day for each working person. On 3 April 1942 we went to Gortshakovo, where my family stayed in a kolkhoz and I joined the Women’s Auxiliary Service, where I remain to this day.

6 March 1943