Wincenty Buben. fireman by profession, Artillery Training Center, School of Artillery Reserve Officers
After the Bolshevik troops came into Vilnius on 18 September 1939, I made my way to the Lithuanian border in Zawias and on 19 September 1939, I crossed the Lithuanian border. I was interned. I stayed in the following camps: Kulautuva, Wiłkomierz and Wojtkuszki.
On 10 July 1940, in the evening, the Bolshevik army surrounded the internment camp in Wojtkuszki. The next day, all of us were taken to the railway station in Wiłkomierz and from there brought to the railway station of Molodechno. There, officers, policemen and gendarmes were designated for a separate transport, while myself and other rank-and-file were brought to the POW camp in Yukhnova near Moscow.
After the arrival at the camp, a detailed registration of personal details took place three days. First, they recorded the highest ranking, i.e. [beginning] with the senior sergeant and his peers. During the registration—which lasted several hours—various sensitive questions were posed, such as: ‘Did you kill a lot of Bolsheviks while serving on the front in 1919–1920?’ Etc.
During the stay in the camp, we were preached to about the benefits of communism, with criticism against Poland, America and England, and praise for Germany and the USSR. They also distributed literature in the Bolshevik spirit. This literature and the canvassing conducted by individual political commissars at the camp had little effect. There were, indeed, several units of Polish prisoners who helped in this canvassing, but this had no effect. Those involved in this canvasing were first and foremost: Dobrowolski—an elementary school teacher from Molodechno, then a platoon cadet (I do not remember the surname), as well as Senior Wachtmeister Szurpit, who served in the 10th Cavalry Regiment in Bialystok. They were employed in the camp administration office and there they hung a poster on the wall with the inscription: ‘To soviet Poland we return through revolution’, with a drawing of a worker crouching and holding a hammer.
Often, individual people at the Yukhnova camp were taken away, even at night, to an unknown destination.
31 May 1941, after a ten-month stay in the Yukhnova camp, we were taken to Murmansk, and from there to the Kola peninsula onboard the Klara Zetkin. There we were forced to work on the construction of an airport and a road. We worked 12 hours a day, without a break, with food that consisted of 100 grams of bread and one ‘millet’ soup per day, without any pork fat. According to me, the Bolsheviks were not here with the intention of building an airport and a road, but [to] to slay us with hunger and cold for being Poles. [Indeed] we stayed out in the open in the Kola Peninsula, with frequent rainfall and hail storms. When someone reported in sick and unable to go to work, he received the answer: ‘Whoever here does not work, does not eat’ and ‘You can lay down and die.’
On the Kola Peninsula, the Bolsheviks concealed from us for some time that they were at war with the Germans, but after a short while they admitted the truth when we had already spotted the shrapnel from ships shelling each other on the White Sea.
On 18 July 1941, we were withdrawn to Arkhangelsk, and from there we were brought to a POW camp in Yuzha, Ivanovo Oblast.
On 25 August 1941, we were informed that diplomatic relations had been established with the Polish government and an agreement had been signed under which we—citizens of Poland—would receive amnesty and a Polish army would be formed in the USSR
On 10 September 1941, we were released from the POW camp, with the pronouncement that we were free citizens of Poland. We left for Tatishchev, where I was assigned to the 5th Polish Light Artillery Regiment.
Army base, 25 February 1943.