Florian Forgacz, son of Marcin and Katarzyna, born on 19 September 1911 in Jezupol, Stanisławów District, Stanisławów Voivodeship, married.
As soon as the Polish-German war broke out, I was drafted into the Polish Army. After the Germans signed an agreement with the Soviets, I returned to my farm.
On 19 September 1940 I was arrested in my house, after it had been searched. I was accused of belonging to Polish organizations. I was arrested along with my friends – Jacyszyn, Matuszewski, and Magnowski – and we were taken by a special truck to the prison in Stanisławów. We were escorted by three militiamen (police) and an NKVD officer.
In prison I was thrown into a two-by-four-meter cell, in which there were 21 arrestees, mostly Poles. For four months I was interrogated every other day with the others. Interrogations were as follows: we were summoned one at a time to special interrogation cells, where NKVD officers were present. The first question I was asked was about my personal data and the information I had concerning other suspects; I was also asked to confess to the crime I was being accused of. If we did not say what the Soviet authorities wanted, they used suitable repressive measures, such as kicking, hitting in the face, or ultimately putting a gun to the head and locking in special cells, spattered with blood. When the investigation came to an end, my friend Jacyszyn and I were transported to the prison in Starobilsk. There, the verdict, rendered in absentia, was read out: five years of forced labor in camps in Kolyma. After four months of temporary work in camps in Starobilsk, I was transported by train to camps in Kolyma with other prisoners. During the transport, we and the railcars were searched; the cars were also checked outside in case they had been damaged. We received 500 grams of bread and some herring per day. As for water, we were given one bucket for thirty people per day. In such conditions, we traveled for 24 days until we reached Buchta Nakhodka, where we were loaded onto a ship after three weeks of work in a camp. The total number of transported people was seven thousand. Among others, they were: military men, police, clerks, farmers, and manual laborers. The conditions were a lot worse than at the previous place because the food rations we received were very small, it was cramped and terribly overcrowded (two thousand people in a cell). The journey by sea took seven days and finally we reached the port of Magadan. As soon as we were unloaded, we were escorted by guards with dogs to distribution camps, and then taken by cars to a gold mine in Duskania [?] situated 750 km from the above-mentioned harbor. I worked there as a mine worker (zabojszczyk). We lived in barracks padded with sacks. The roof had cracks, so water leaked in on everybody’s head.
We slept on bunk beds and on the ground, which caused swelling and death among the people who lived there. A 5-by-20-meter barrack accommodated a hundred people. Deaths were caused by shooting or torture inflicted by the guards if prisoners were not obedient or did not go to work.
The local doctors had no medicines and their medical knowledge was actually very poor. The gold mine was situated on the surface, so not as corridors, just a huge open pit surrounded by walls of ore and guards standing with their rifles ready to fire. It should be mentioned that winter lasted seven months there. The temperature fell to 60–70 degrees below zero, while in summer – which was usually short – it rained.
I personally fell seriously ill, with swelling of my torso, resulting in me being sent to a camp for the sick.
I did not receive any letters from my wife, who stayed in the part of Poland occupied by the Soviet army.
When the Polish-Soviet agreement was signed, some Poles were dismissed from work and sent back to transit camps. I spent two months in such a camp. On 1 January 1942, I received the so-called udostoverenie [certificate of release], and then I joined the newly formed Polish army. The place where I joined the army: Lugovoy in the Kazakh Republic.