Albin Ostapiński, born in 1917, Polish nationality, Roman Catholic.
On 13 February 1940, I was arrested in the Zaleszczyki district, on the Romanian border, by Soviet border guards. They took me to the prison in Chortkiv. During the arrest, they wounded me in the leg with a bayonet, and they beat me.
In Chortkiv I was held in rundown barracks. Due to the lack of space, we had to stand for a couple of days in a row. It was 30 degrees below zero outside, and in the prison cells there were no windows. During the interrogation, in order to extract a confession, they put a gun to our heads.
From Chortkiv, they took me with a transport to Czernihów. They didn’t provide us with any water, so all the people in the transport suffered from the lack of it. People asked for snow to quench their thirst, but they refused this – that was the rule.
I was in Czernihów from 12 March to 30 May 1940. They sentenced me to five years in a labor camp there. During the interrogation by the NKVD, they kicked and beat me in order to force me to sign all the false charges they’d been pressing.
After announcing the sentence, they sent me to Abis [Abez] by the Usa River in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. I was cutting trees in the woods. We got 300 grams of bread daily, five potatoes and soup. The death rate was high. On average, 15 people died every day.
In September 1941, I was released and sent to Buzuluk, and from there, because of the lack of vacancies in the army, I went to a kolkhoz in Kungrad, near the Amu Darya River in the Karakalpak Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The NKVD was supervising the transport by the Amu Darya. 60 people died during the transport, and many others threw themselves into the river. Housing conditions in the kolkhozes were terrible, and people were starving there.
In March 1942 I joined the Polish Army (7th Infantry Division).