Volunteer Irena Pietruszewska, 19 years old, student.
I was transported to Siberia on 16 June 1941 from Wilno as a person from the territory occupied by the Germans.
I worked in the woods at forced labor in the Altai Krai, Barnaul Oblast, Kalmansky District, barrack 91.
We lived twelve kilometers from the village of Pyotrovka. Our barrack stood in a clearing. There were woods all around. There were no other buildings except for the barrack and a small house where the overseers lived. The barrack was new – clean, well-lit, but cold. Sanitary conditions were tolerable. There was no shortage of water and wood. There was no soap, we prepared lye out of ash. There were 22 Poles, including four children. At the beginning, we lived together with Lithuanians, but after several quarrels, the Lithuanians were separated into three larger rooms, and Poles into a smaller one. There were 130 Lithuanians, mostly officers and policemen. The Poles were mostly doctors and teachers. We worked separately, too, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., in the woods, five kilometers from the barrack. We felled trees, chopped them, sawed, and arranged them into meter-sized squares. Every hour, we had a five-minute zakurka [break]. The quota was 12 square meters, 1.8 rubles per square meter. We ate dinner in the mess hall, usually dry groats, with 500 grams of bread for the entire day. We had to procure other food for the entire day ourselves, so we traded clothes, shoes, gold, and other materials for such products as milk, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, etc. On Sundays, NKVD overseers came from the district town of Kalmanka and gave some lectures or talks about the war, work, Communism, etc.
There was no Soviet doctor or physician in our barrack, but our doctors, midwives, and nurses, I mean Polish and Lithuanian ones, had medicines and shots, so we usually didn’t need help [from Soviet doctors]. The closest Soviet doctor was in Kalmanka. There was a female physician in the village of Pyotrovka (12 kilometers away). No Poles died. A few Lithuanians died, but I don’t know their names.
Communication with Poland was stopped because of the war (I had been deported a week before the war).