Henryk Klimek, born in 1900, Roman Catholic, Polish national.
On 10 February 1940, the NKVD took me from my home and put me in a transport bound for Russia at the Rejtanów railway station in the Nowogródek Voivodeship. My wife and two of my children were taken at the same time. My two sons, who attended the gymnasium in Nieśwież, were arrested later and joined us on the way. The journey lasted three weeks. We were given no food, we could only eat whatever we had brought from home. The wagons were not heated, even though the temperature outside was 36 degrees below zero. The transport made its way to Pinega, in the Arkhangelsk Oblast, and then the Kulety settlement. I worked with my wife and two older children, chopping wood and sending it floating downstream. Our wages were so low that we could only buy a ration of bread intended for one working individual. In addition to bread, our daily food ration consisted of boiled water. Soon the children fell ill from exhaustion and cold, and also because the clothes that they had brought with them from Poland had become torn and we had no money to buy new ones. Later my wife and children had to support me, because for six months the Soviet government was withholding my wages as punishment after I had skipped work during a minus 47-degree frost, when I was in tattered clothes and had no boots.
As the result of a number of collective petitions sent on several occasions to the Polish delegation in Kuybyshev, I was released along with the other deportees in this settlement on 24 December 1941. In February 1942 I was enlisted into the Polish Army (6th Infantry Division) in Yakkabog.