1. Personal details (name, surname, rank, age, occupation and marital status):
Senior Rifleman Tadeusz Roszek, 26 years old, post-office worker, unmarried.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
On 17 September 1939, in the territory of the Border Protection Corps company “Bielczaki”, and again on 17 December while crossing the Romanian border in the vicinity of Horodenka.
3. Name of the camp, prison, place of forced labor:
The prisoner of war camp in Starobilsk, in a former monastery. [I was held] in the area of the camp and in all the buildings of the monastery. After I was arrested on the Romanian border: jails in Czortków, Tarnopol, Lwów – in the Brygidki [a prison in the building of a former Bridgettine nunnery] – Dnipropetrovsk, and Starobilsk, then in the labor camp of Ivdel, Gorconovka (Sverdlovsk Oblast).
4. Description of the camp, prison, etc. (grounds, buildings, living conditions, hygiene):
The prisons were terribly overcrowded, we slept on the floor, there were lice (in Brygidki and Dnipropetrovsk only). In the camp we were living in barracks. We were sleeping on bunk beds without straw mattresses or covers
5. Composition of prisoners, captives, deportees (nationality, types of crime, intellectual and moral level, mutual relations, etc.):
In the prisons there were mainly Poles as political prisoners, also the local Ukrainians and Ukrainians from Hungary and Romania. In the camp, mainly Russians as political and common criminals. Relations with the Poles were very good, they were mostly of the intelligentsia.
6. Life in the camp, prison, etc. (the course of an average day, work conditions, quotas, remuneration, food, clothing, social and cultural life, etc.):
We got up at 4 a.m., then toilet, breakfast, lunch, and after lunch we were let out to the toilet. Every few days we had a 10-minute walk.
In the labor camp we got up at 4 a.m., then breakfast, at 5.20 a.m. there was the razvod [a kind of roll-call, preparation for marching out] and off to work to the forest. We came back from work after sunset, then lunch and dinner, that is, a half-liter of soup and three spoons of groats. Our work was to cut out trees and, during spring, floating them on rafts. It was impossible for the Poles to meet the quotas and generally they got penal portions of food, that is, 400 grams of bread and half a liter of “soup” two times a day. The lack of shoes was bothersome, we were going to work with feet wrapped in rags, we didn’t have underwear or warm clothes. Social life existed only among the Poles. In the prison we had many talks and discussions. In the camp, cultural life was totally neglected because there were no conditions to do anything of that sort.
7. The NKVD authorities’ attitude towards the Poles (interrogation methods, torture, punishments, communist propaganda, information about Poland, etc.):
The NKVD interrogations were frequent, always during the night. During the interrogation I was beaten in the face several times and once I was hit with a chair. I was punished with a punishment cell two times.
8. Medical care, hospitals, mortality (give the names of the dead):
In the prison in Dnipropetrovsk the mortality was very high (especially due to tuberculosis), I can’t remember the names of the deceased.
9. What kind of contact, if any, was there with your family and country?
I didn’t have any contact with my family, because my letters didn’t reach the country.
10. When you were released and how did you get to the army?
I was released on 1 September 1941 due to the amnesty. It was difficult to get to the Polish Army. I was going in a transport that was headed to the south, and then to Nukus, from there I went to Chazhov and then to Guzar.