Antoni Januchowski, born in 1900, Roman-Catholic, Polish nationality, a non-commissioned professional officer in the cavalry, previously in the 4th Uhlan Regiment in Wilno.
On 19 September 1939, my superiors and I were interned in Wykomierz [Wiłkomierz] and Połąga, Lithuania. In June 1940, I was deported along with the whole camp to Yukhnov, Babynino railway station, in roofed freight wagons. At Molodechno station, the transport was divided in such a way that chaplain priests, officers, gendarmes, policemen and border guards were separated by the NKVD and later placed in Kozelsk camp, to my knowledge. There were around 3,000 people in the Yukhnov camp, and all of them had been interned in Lithuania or Latvia. The labor was carried out mostly on the camp’s premises, but no work quotas were imposed on us. Food rations – compared to what we ate back in Poland – were usually very poor and insufficient, with almost no fats. It’s enough to say that during 10 months everybody lost from 20 to 35 kilos of weight.
It’s hard to precisely determine the camp’s composition in terms of nationality, however there were Ukrainians, Jews, Belarussians, and I also encountered Protestants born in Germany. I don’t remember their surnames, but they strongly disapproved of Hitler and the Reich’s politics. A very painful thing in the Yukhnov camp was that there was a so-called commune or a temple organized under directions of Corporal Dobrowolski (a teacher by profession) from Molodechno. The commune was attended mostly by intellectuals, such as teachers, clerks, cadets and non-commissioned officers. The lectures took place almost every evening, with the doors shut and windows covered. From my colleagues’ accounts, I know that they were learning to become politworkers [political workers] and were taking an exam on that matter, and that they sent a card to Stalin thanking for having been freed, with signatures; they were painting posters with the slogan “through revolution to Soviet Poland”; they held anti-religious lectures, appointed a communist government of the future Poland, and likely, they were judging our government in England. They were often visited by the NKVD men, and whenever they came a joyful and happy atmosphere prevailed.
The Soviet propaganda in the camp was really active, but one-sided, anti-Polish and anti- democratic, shamelessly mendacious, done by political commissioners and politworkers. They would express themselves by saying that England was a prostitute and democracy was syphilis to the ground, that it was only to be lifted onto [illegible] and it would vanish, that officers and non-commissioned officers of the Polish Army used to beat their subordinates, that Poland existed just for 20 years and it would be no more, that Poland had one plow for every five farmers and that the Germans were fighting a just war. On our side, just out of curiosity, questions were posed and answers were given, which compromised all the blatant lies they were feeding us. In reaction, they asked for our surnames and noted them down – we often gave surnames of people who weren’t even in the camp. We often responded with screams and whistles to their lies. It was at the beginning of our stay in the camp when they said that attending the lectures was mandatory. When it became clear that taking part was voluntary, the speaker was left surrounded only by a couple of listeners, who most probably were making fun of him. I should mention here that the senior lieutenant politworker used to read out the articles from their newspaper “Pravda” like a semi-literate person.
They also screened movies, but from what I’d heard I know it was all lies and mockery. A library was open, very rich in Marx’s, Engels’s, and Lenin’s books. They were only read by the “commune-temple” goers.
Health care was really scrupulous, thanks to the fact that our doctors were performing the duties. Mortality was minimal. Lousiness only by negligence. Bathrooms and the disinfecting facility were open every day, so that your turn came every 10 days.
Cultural life and patriotism thrived day by day thanks to the loyal sons of Poland. Prayers often took place in hiding, in the attics of old buildings, in the bushes, or quietly on the fourth level of bunk beds. During movie screenings and during the breaks when the equipment failed, the audience would often sing patriotic songs like “Poland Is Not Yet Lost” etc., in sign of protest against the ultra-blatant lies. In those cases, the politruks [political workers] would tell us to disperse, screaming with anger. But it happened [only] after we finished the song. The commune participants willingly attended the screenings, showing their honest satisfaction. There were voices in the crowd that we should hang the commune-goers – traitors of the nation – and none of them would come back to the fatherland alive. But this didn’t scare them; they blindly believed that free Poland nie wsiegda.
I received four letters from my wife and children from Wilno, the last one in April 1941. In June 1941 the Yukhnov camp was deported to Murmansk, and then to the Kola Peninsula. A couple of days after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, we were moved through Arkhangelsk to Vyazniki – for the first time, Polish internees and POWs were placed in the same camp. There were about 10,000 of us. Then a representative of the Republic of Poland, Colonel Sulik-Sarnowski, came to the camp and we were accepted into the Polish Army in the USSR. I was assigned to the 5th Infantry Division “Tatishchevo”.
In the Kola Peninsula, before the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, we suffered hunger and inhumane treatment – there was a total lack of food. We received 80 grams of bread a day and a flour soup with no fat twice a day. They wouldn’t let us use water for washing ourselves or the dishes. There was a sense that we were truly brought there for extermination just because we were Poles.
13 February 1942