1. [Personal details:]
Artillery Corporal Ignacy Raszka, 42 years old, farmer, married; field post number: 163.
2. [Date and circumstances of arrest:]
I was transported with my family on 10 February 1940 as a settler.
3. [Name of the camp, prison, place of forced labor:]
I was placed in the rural settlement of Kharitonovo, Solvychegodsky district, Arkhangelsk Oblast.
4. [Description of the camp, prison:]
The rural settlement was in the forest, we were living in wooden dwellings filled with bedbugs. Nine persons in one dwelling.
5. [Composition of prisoners, captives, deportees:]
Poselentsy [political prisoners] mixed with Ukrainians. The local inhabitants were hostile towards us.
6. [Life in the camp, prison:]
We all had to work, our income amounted three to four rubles a day. I managed to earn enough for a kilogram of bread, water was free because a river was nearby. I was selling remnants of clothes and was making shoes out of old wadded sleeves.
7. [The NKVD authorities’ attitude towards the Poles:]
The NKVD was hostile towards Poland and the Poles.
8. [Medical care, hospitals, mortality:]
Medical care was minimal. Around thirty persons died due to the lack of it: Łubek, Bentkowski, Lipowski, Lipowska, Jabłoński and others.
9. [What kind of contact, if any, was there with your family and country?]
I didn’t have any contact with our country.
10. [When you were released and how did you get to the army?]
I was released after the amnesty was declared. Then, begging for bread, I managed to transport my family to the Karakalpak Republic where I worked in the kolkhoz. Afterwards, I volunteered for the army in Guzar.
Quarters, 16 March 1943