POLAND IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR 333tion of our eastern provinces into the USSR. Having refused to submit the resolution, I
was immediately arrested, and confined in the jail at Drohobycz. In the course of the
investigation which followed, I was accused of betraying the interest of the workers, of
action inimical to Stalin, of support of Trotsky and other Soviet traitors, and so on. I was
sentenced on 15 December 1939 to ten years' hard labour in a camp, by a military tri-
bunal. Until 10 January I was kept in the Drohobycz prison, and then transferred to
another prison in Lwow, and later from Lwow to Odessa.
In Odessa, I was kept in prison from 1 February until 7 March of the same year. The
prison at Odessa was full of Poles. I was with thirteen other persons in a cell intended to
accommodate two. From 7 March until 17 April I was one of a convoy being taken to
Vladivostok. During the journey, the prisoners now and again received a little bread, but
as a general rule nothing but tinned herrings with some boiling water in very small quan-
tities. In Vladivostok, there was an enormous clearinghouse from which prisoners were
distributed among camps in the province of Khabarovsk... There were some 25,000
prisoners camping here in the open ... On zo May, together with a large transport of my
fellow-prisoners, I was taken across the Sea of Japan to Magadan, and from there by
lorry to another distributing centre. From this centre we proceeded to Maldiak, 1,700
kilometres away on the River Kolyma. We arrived in Maldiak on 26 June 1940. There
were four camps there, each containing 2,500 persons, and we lived in huts covered by
tenting, one hundred prisoners to each hut. We slept on bare bunks made not of planks
but of logs ...
By the end of September, the snow was up to our knees. At Magadan, we had been
given winter jackets, and in the camp a few received felt leg coverings and another type
of warm jacket called bushlaki.
The whole region around the camp was utterly deserted ... At each advance of the
Soviets into the interior of their country, the native inhabitants moved further and fur-
ther into the taiga...
Reveille was at 5 a.m. Before going to work, the prisoners got a piece of bread each and
a portion of gruel. After this, and in a column four across, we were marched to our places
in the mines. The mining was for gold. On our way to work, an orchestra sometimes
played. The work on the surface consisted of digging earth, often mixed with gravel. We
dug with picks, crowbars, and shovels, and in winter when the ground was frozen, with
chisels. It was indeed convict's work. The daily norm was 125 barrels of earth dug, which
then had to be pushed a distance of between three and four hundred metres. Below the
surface these mines were 120-50 feet deep, and accidents were frequent... The unfortu-
nate victims of accidents were hauled to the surface, their hands cut off as proof of death
to be shown to the authorities, and the bodies thrust beneath the brushwood. At 12.30
there was half-an-hour break, and we got our dinner, consisting of 150 grammes of bread
and a portion of thin skilly; and occasionally a piece of fish. After that we kept on unin-
terruptedly until 8 p.m. The prisoners who had not finished their norm by then had to
work for two hours more...
The prisoners were of all classes... and of all nationalities of the Soviet Union and of
the states who are her neighbours.
The orchestra very often played while the prisoners were at work. To the accompani-
ment of this music, the guards would call out prisoners whose work was especially fee-
ble and shoot them there and then. The shots rang out one after another ... A Jew from
Lwow working alongside me was so exhausted that he repeatedly fainted at work. The
guard ordered him to fall out, took him to a nearby shed, and there he was shot. I heard