A Polish Young Man’s WWII Survival in the Soviet Union
Germany and the Soviet Union defeated and divided Poland between them in September of 1939. The Soviets quickly arrested and deported University professors, police officers, border guards, lawyers, doctors, pastors, priests, physicians, engineers, journalists, pilots, teachers, landowners, writers, chaplains, civic leaders, and any other person deemed a threat to the establishment of a communist society. The Soviets arrested anyone wearing a uniform, even boy scouts!
The fascinating story of Mietek Rymaszewski begins in the small town of Malkowicze in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland during the winter of 1940. Mietek belonged to a youth cadet organization but had been too young to fight at the outbreak of WWII. After a number of families from his town were deported to Siberia in February, word came of his own impending arrest due to his youth organization ties.
Mietek packed underwear, food, and a little money, bade farewell to his mother and younger brother and left during the night with two female school friends. He never returned to Malkowicze. The train ride toward the border was interrupted twice by NKVD (secret police) passenger checks. At the first check he was questioned about the contents of the suitcase he carried for one of his friends.
Mietek replied that he was taking the items to his sister at college, and the NKVD let him pass. The two girls said they were traveling to college, and they were allowed through. At the next passenger check, Mietek and his friends moved to a group that had already been processed, avoiding another search. The threesome arrived safely in the city of Łomża, near the border between Soviet occupied Poland and East Prussia (Germany).
Mietek and his companions went to a prearranged address where they waited for an opportunity to cross into German-controlled territory. The moon was full and the nights were too light to avoid detection in the open, flat country covered with deep snow. Growing impatient, Mietek left with a guide who took him to within three kilometers of the border. Before parting, Mietek questioned his guide thoroughly about nearby villages, landmarks, woodlands, and the best places to cross the border. Later when he was intercepted by a Russian soldier, he posed as a local citizen, accurately describing the area. The soldier let him pass, but Mietek returned to Łomża because of the impossibility of successfully crossing the border. The Russian patrols were too active at the time.
Mietek’s two schoolmates sold some of their jewelry and returned home, but the jewelry dealer sold out the owner of the house and the other potential escapees. The NKVD surrounded the house, arrested everyone, and took them to the NKVD station in an old seminary. The officers plied the prisoners with questions. Who were they? Where were they from? And what they were doing in Lomza? The prisoners were put in separate cellars at the old seminary so they couldn’t talk with one another but not before Mietek let his companions know he had changed his name. He was determined to protect his mother.
Fifty men shared the cellar with Mietek, including smugglers from Warsaw who bragged about their exploits. They described their route in detail, and Mietek memorized everything he heard. Since the penalty for those coming into the Soviet occupied section of Poland was less severe than for those caught escaping, Mietek prepared his story. When he was questioned, he said he had come from Warsaw and was headed to Bialystok (about 80 km/50 miles away) to find his uncle. He described his journey, including a detour at the river Narew where the bridge had been blown up. He had crossed an improvised bridge and took another train.
When Mietek’s interrogators asked him how he had crossed the border (from German-occupied territory into Russian-occupied territory), he claimed he didn’t know he’d crossed the border. The NKVD believed him. An army officer came in to report the arrival of new captives, and the NKVD berated the officer for not having stopped Mietek at the crossing.
Mietek’s interrogation lasted for several weeks, and the NKVD officers used a variety of methods to coerce confessions from the prisoners for whatever they were accused of committing—usually spying. The prisoners were forced to sit on a small stool with sharp edges and corners, which cut into their spines. The NKVD used special handcuffs, tightening them until the prisoners’ hands turned blue, causing pain and then numbness. They stood the prisoners against a wall and pointed a gun to their heads. Another interrogator would enter and gently question the prisoners and then pretend that he was going to shoot them also. Prisoners were pulled in for questioning at two o’clock in the morning, submitted to a volley of rapid-fire questions, and suffered if their answers were inconsistent.
A well-known engineer in Mietek’s cellar was accused of spying, and the NKVD tortured him for hours at a time. He would come back covered in bruises, bleeding, and unable to walk.
Someone scratched a hole in the wall, allowing communication with the women prisoners in the next cell. The women collected a matchbox full of lice, and when an inspector visited, they complained about the conditions. The inspector said the lice problem was their own fault, so they threw their collection at him, and he raced out of the cellar.
Mietek was transferred to the Łomża Prison and later taken with hundreds of other prisoners to the railway station and loaded into cattle trucks. Destination – Siberia.
The next morning the train pulled out of the station headed east. The prisoners united to sing a patriotic Polish song, vowing to “defend the Polish spirit” from the Russians. The guards riding between and on top of the cattle cars unsuccessfully tried to quiet the prisoners.
After passing through five cities and into Byelorussia, the train stopped at Gomel near the Ukraine, and the prisoners were escorted in groups of fifty to the local prison. Mietek saw the largest rats he’d ever seen. They ran along the top of the wall and fed on corpses in the mortuary.
Fifty men shared the 4 by 5 meter cells (13 x 16 feet). They were only allowed to exercise in the yard for ten minutes each day. As they marched down the winding stairs, a number of prisoners committed suicide by jumping down head first, forcing the Russians to install netting on the bannisters to prevent these deaths. One prisoner hid in an outbuilding and escaped over the wall after dark. Dogs tracked him, and the Soviets beat him up, put him in a penal cell, and reduced his food allotment.
An epidemic of dysentery passed through the prison—those with the worst cases went to the hospital on the ground floor. They were stripped and given only a blanket so they wouldn’t climb out the bathroom window, jump onto the wall and attempt to escape.
In August of 1940, the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) sentenced Mietek to serve three years in corrective camps of the Northern Railway in Kotlas, Northern Russia. He refused to sign the paper, so the NKVD officer signed the documents for him, using Mietek’s false name since the NKVD had never discovered his true identity. He was taken to a new cell, and one of the occupants jumped up calling out Mietek’s name. To everyone’s surprise, Mietek’s cousin Edward was also a prisoner. The two remained together for the rest of their captivity.
Again the Soviets separated the prisoners into groups of fifty, escorted them to the railway station, and loaded them in cattle trucks. They traveled through Minsk and then Smolensk where Mietek’s grandfather had been wounded during WWI.
Between Leningrad and Kotlas, a Bielorussin cut a hole in the floor of a cattle truck with a piece of flint and dropped between the rails. Unfortunately the guards saw him, stopped the train, and beat the prisoner black and blue.
They arrived at Kotlas to find a camp holding a few huts, a high barbed wire fence with a tower in each corner, soldiers brandishing rifles and machine guns, and knee-deep mud. There were two ditches – one for drinking water and one for a latrine. After a short time at this camp, the prisoners were taken in groups of fifty about eight kilometers through the taiga to the Northern Dvina River. They sailed north on barges for a few days, stopping at night. They were given 300 grams (10.5 oz.) of bread and a small piece of boiled fish during the journey.
The new camp was a completely empty square piece of ground, so Mietek and his fellow prisoners used tools lent to them and cut down trees to build shelters and fires. Since Mietek had grown up in the forest, he built a safe shelter for himself and a small group of fellow prisoners; however, others built inadequate shelters which collapsed during the night, killing the occupants.
Mietek and the other prisoners decided to escape while they were out of camp collecting firewood, but on the planned day Mietek woke up with legs so swollen his flesh hung over his boot leggings. He had scurvy and the escape was called off. The prisoners later learned to boil pine and spruce needles and drink the brew to fight scurvy. They boiled willow bark and twigs to make a drink substituting for aspirin. They also boiled the twigs of bilberries to cure diarrhea. The water in the ditches overflowed and mixed with the drinking water, causing dysentery, so the prisoners learned to only drink water from melted snow.
After a few weeks the prisoners moved to a new camp where they found marquee type tents pulled over a wooden frame-work with a small metal stove and firewood inside. A group of Estonian sailors shared Mietek’s tent. These strong, healthy, intelligent, and good-looking young men needed lots of food, but they didn’t get it and were the first to die. The old and weak perished next. A group of Lithuanians in the tent also died – the last one with his head frozen to the tent. From November, 1940 to February, 1941, 300 of the 360 captives died.
The prisoners built a railway line from Kotlas to Vorkuta by digging soil from the hillside and taking it in wheelbarrows to the embankment. If they didn’t obtain the required cubic meters of soil each day, their food rations were reduced – 300 grams (10.5 oz.) of bread and some watery soup twice a day.
A Russian railway supervisor, also a prisoner, asked to buy Mietek’s jacket and boots – hunting boots with high leggings made of very good leather. Mietek agreed, although the items were worth much more than the supervisor paid for them. But he did reward Mietek with a new job – measuring and recording the soil in each man’s wheelbarrow. It was wise Mietek was meticulous in his measurements because a supervisor checked his work. Later he heard that six million cubic meters had been overlooked and two Russian engineers were shot for it.
One morning after a heavy snowfall in late December, Mietek strode to his worksite in the frigid temperatures and worked up a sweat. Finding a hole that had been chiseled in the ice of a nearby river, he drew a cup of water and drank from it. A nasty chill resulted, and by the end of the day, a 102°F fever gripped him. On December 31st, Mietek was taken to the hospital, a deep dugout located outside the prison camp. At first he was delirious, but soon he lost consciousness.
Sometime later, Mietek awakened but couldn’t lift his head. After drifting off, he woke again and asked how long he had been at the hospital. The doctor pointed to a calendar tacked to a post. The day was February 5th. He’d been unconscious for thirty-six days! Lena, a nurse and also a prisoner, brought bread, dipped it in tea, and fed Mietek by hand. She had kept him alive in the same way all the weeks he was unconscious.
Mietek gradually gained strength and helped the nurses by carrying food to the other patients. Later when the doctor examined him, the doctor told Mietek he was all right but just needed food. To help solve the problem, the doctor hired Mietek to keep a fire going in his dugout at night. When the doctor came in, he shared food brought from the kitchen with Mietek.
On May 11th Mietek was escorted back to camp and returned to work the next day – cutting firewood for locomotives. A nasty blizzard struck and left a case of frostbite on Mietek’s face. The male sickroom nurse provided him with a mixture of surgical spirit and glycerin, and his skin began to heal after a few weeks.
Mietek and his fellow prisoners moved on to build an embankment to support bridge timbers for a rail line spanning a deep river. Next, they relocated to a camp on the River Pechora where they pulled timber out of the river, cut it, and rolled it to a small sawmill to be cut for railway sleepers. Here Mietek saw eskimos and reindeer for the first time.
Many young Russians lived in this camp, and some of them stole whatever they wanted or took the items by force. One Russian demanded Mietek’s soup, so he quickly drank it and rammed the bowl in the Russian’s mouth, causing his mouth to bleed. The same fellow approached Mietek as he was lying down that night, so Mietek struck him a few times with a stick, and the Russian walked off holding his ribs. The fellow didn’t bother Mietek again.
After the ice on the Ust Usa River melted, the prisoners sailed up the river on barges and crossed the Arctic Circle. They passed an area where many human bones protruded from the melting snow. Some of the Russians thought these were the remains of eight hundred slaves who’d been trapped by an Arctic storm while they were marching on foot to Vorkuta (an area where prisoners slaved in the uranium mines).
It was thought that the whole convoy had frozen except for the escort commander who’d escaped with a pack of dogs. Since Mietek and his fellow prisoners were heading to the same place, he expected the Soviets to force them to work the mines until the radiation finished them off. Meanwhile, the men in his convoy continued to die from malnutrition.
But . . . another miracle transpired.
Before arriving in Vorkuta, an official boarded and pulled all the prisoners from Poland off the barges. Because Germany had invaded Russia, the Soviets were joining the Allies in their fight against the Germans and had agreed to release all Polish citizens held in the Soviet Union. They released Polish POW General Anders from prison to immediately gather and train a Polish Army in the east to aid the Allied fight.
The Soviets sent Mietek back to camp and tried to persuade him to join their army, but he carefully responded that he hadn’t been educated in Russian and wouldn’t feel right in the Russian Army. Instead, Mietek and a group of other former prisoners boarded a cattle truck and rode south to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East. They rode the same rail line they had previously built and relished the freedom of traveling unguarded in Russia for the first time.
Obtaining food became an immediate priority. Along the way, the former prisoners were occasionally given boiled fish and a piece of bread, and at some stations they obtained all the boiled water they wanted. At one stop Mietek exchanged his shirt for a small bantam hen and a few potatoes. He plucked and cleaned the hen, confiscated a large can by a well, gathered nettles, and made four gallons of soup. Since the train never stopped for long, Mietek built a fire at each stop, gradually cooking the broth until it was ready to eat.
Mietek traveled from Kotlas in northern Russia through Svierdlovsk and Kyubishov to Buzeluk on the southern Russian frontier, each time expecting to find a Polish recruiting station but only to discover the offices had moved. He and his companions traveled through the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and entered Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, also under Soviet control.
While waiting at a stop further south, Mietek attempted to do some trading. He went to the closest hamlet and knocked on a door. He was invited in and discovered a poor Russian family of three sharing a meal of tiny potatoes. Observing their plight, Mietek only asked for water, but after the family learned that he had been recently released from the labor camps, they insisted he share their meal. With tears in her eyes, the Russian woman gave Mietek a half glass of milk from their meager stores.
Courtesy of Franek Rymaszewski
Continuing south, Mietek and his companions arrived in Samarkand (outer Mongolia) and slept outside for a few nights until barges arrived and took them to Nukus near the Aral Sea. They walked behind an Uzbeki riding an oxen-driven cart to a collective farm 120 kilometers away and stayed with the Uzbeki families. They slept in a tent-like accommodation covered with homemade felt, ate sesame flat bread, rice and sesame meal noodles with some meat, and drank boiled water. Mietek’s host was the local school teacher who was embittered because the Red Army had killed his father, confiscated his father’s lands, and eaten his herds of livestock without compensation. He vowed to one day get it back.
After news arrived that the Polish recruiting office had reopened in Bukhara, Mietek and his fellow travelers spent a day and a night walking back to Nukus where they soaked their blistered feet in the river. They sailed on barges down the River Amudarya to Farab near Samarkand and were encouraged by the majestic flight of three white eagles above the river. Mietek also witnessed the reunion of a Polish husband and wife who’d been separated since 1939 and had survived the labor camps. In Farab, they stayed in rail trucks and were given a dead dog to eat. While Mietek was with an NKVD officer getting soup (boiled water with a few green tomatoes), some of his companions stole millet. After he returned, they were all arrested by the local militia and sent to the Samarkand Prison.
A number of Russians and Uzbekis shared Mietek’s cell. One Russian was imprisoned for being fifteen minutes late to work (his wife was sick). Mietek and his companions went to court where his charges were dropped, but three others were given the maximum sentence (death penalty). Then a man spoke, pleading that the men had been brought up in a capitalist country and didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and they should be allowed to repay their crime by joining the army. The court released them with a warning to be out of Samarkand within twenty-four hours.
Mietek and a friend walked to Bukhara, surviving on weeds and desert tortoise eggs. When they arrived, the recruiting office was empty, but after two days a Polish 2nd lieutenant arrived and took them to the railway station. He shielded them from Soviet agents who were in the area conscripting the local men for the Russian Army. They traveled to Kermine where the Polish garrison was stationed, and Mietek gave his true name for the first time since he had been captured by the Soviets in Poland. Despite reaching the Polish Army, forty men died daily from the prolonged starvation they had endured. Even Mietek collapsed and spent two days in the hospital where he was put on a special diet.
As the Polish recruits gained strength, their military training increased. For a time, the Soviets refused to provide the Polish garrison at Kermine with transportation to Persia (Iran), where they planned to connect with the British Army. Instead the Soviets tried to persuade them to fight on the Eastern Front with the Russian Army. The Polish military leaders objected, and the troops prepared to march out. The Soviets didn’t have enough forces in the area to stop them, so they provided transportation to Krasnovodskon on the Caspian Sea.
Franek Rymaszewski
The Polish troops and civilians at Krasnovodsk crossed the Caspian Sea on rusty, old ships, fighting dysentery and dehydration. One day while standing in line for his water ration, Mietek noticed a pair of bright, young eyes watching him through the gaps in the steps. Then he heard a young voice say, “Mum, it’s Mietek.” The girl’s mother appeared and greeted him. She was the daughter of the station master from his home town in Poland! She shared that they had been deported to Siberia with his mother, brother, and grandfather. She gave Mietek his mother’s address, and he was able to later make contact with her.
In Pahlavi, Iran, the troops showered, obtained haircuts, and were powdered with insecticide. They burned their uniforms and were issued new tropical uniforms. Mietek was posted to Iraq, where he defended a refinery and later an airport and served as a driving instructor. His unit transferred to Palestine and then North Africa. In Egypt, Mietek volunteered for the infantry and fought in Italy. He was wounded in a battle on the the Kenti River and was hospitalized in Taranto and in Scotland. He recuperated and returned to Italy, where he guarded German POW’s following the war.
After his time of service, Mietek settled in England and worked for the forestry commission. He married Stephanie Burnett, an English widow. The Soviets resettled Mietek’s mother in western Poland, but Mietek didn’t see her again until she visited him in England in 1963, twenty-four years after parting. They didn’t recognize each other after all that time, but she stayed for five months. When Mietek visited Poland in 1988 (after a 49-year absence), he was disturbed by the moral scars caused by the communist domination of the country.
Courtesy of Franek Rymaszewski
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