Two weeks after Germany attacked Poland, over a million of Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east on 17th September 1939.

The Red Army entered Piñsk on Wednesday 20 September 1939, three days after crossing Polish border. Presumably "the Pripet Marshes" were not easy to cross.

Photo on the right : Red Army crosses the Polish border on the 17th September 1939, after destroying the border marker. Soon afterwards all boundary markers were removed.

From the moment of entry into the eastern part of Poland the Red Army began mass arrests and deportations. Some prominent people were executed outright.

After entering Piñsk on 20th September 1939, they destroyed the Jesuits Catholic Church with close range heavy artillery fire, using an excuse that there were some snipers shooting from church spires. Few days later they set fire to the Russian Orthodox cathedral. They decided to keep the Jewish synagogue, explaining that its structure would be suitable for public baths (banya).

During the 21 months of occupation of Eastern Poland (until June 1941 when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union) the Russians systematically continued to arrest civilians, usually in the middle of the night. They were government public servants as well as local administration, high school lecturers as well as primary school teachers, lawyers, merchants, manufacturers, landowners as well as "kulaks" (well-off peasants), social and political activists, etc. These were locked up in prisons for interrogations of false accusations, fake trials, and sentencing. Due to lack of prison space in Pinsk, also former Polish military barracks in the town were turned into prison.

Due to overflow, even there in the army barracks, a lot of prisoners were transferred to a large Soviet prison in Minsk. The interrogations lasted for many months, due to the fact that victims could not agree and resisted false and stupid accusations until they were broken physically and mentally. They were accused of being saboteurs, spies, exploiters of the working class, counterrevolutionaries (i.e. members of non socialist organizations, even dating back to 1919-20 Polish-Bolshevik war !), and also those that were recently crossing (either way) the new Soviet-German border, etc. Sentences were severe and the victims were sent to various gulags. Half of them have not survived the first two years. At the same time, the families of all arrested men (i.e. women, children and old people), were removed in four mass deportations to hard labour in various remote parts of the Soviet Union in Northern Russia and Siberia. Total number of victims, about 2 million people.

The Soviets imposed the Soviet citizenship on the whole population in occupied Eastern Poland and issued compulsory "internal" passports to all, thus breaking the international law which gives rights to a person to define his own nationality.

In February 1940, Soviet passport was issued to me in Piñsk and my mother, conferring Soviet citizenship on us. My passport was numbered 1 - PI - No. 520 587. Letters PI were in Russian alphabet, meaning "Piñsk".

In Siberia my passport was taken away and a new one issued numbered AK - No. 720 937, with annotation "spetz-peresielenetz", meaning "special deportee-convict". Letters AK meaning Akmoliñsk, capital of the province, now called Tselinograd.

My spare photo, age 16, taken in Pinsk for the soviet passport, soon before my deportation.

It is the same small size as original with white corner intended for impression of the segment of a round stamp.

The map shows organized deportations of civilian population to forced labour camps and gulags, taken from homes at night simultaneously in all districts of occupied eastern Poland. During 21 months of Soviet occupation, from 17 September 1939 to 22 June 1941, there were four mass deportations :

• on 10th of February 1940
• on 13th of April 1940 (when I was deported)
• on 29th of June 1940
• in June 1941 (just before Hitler decided to attack Russia)

The initial figure of civilian deportees only in these mass removals was 1 million 80 thousands (8 percent of the population of this area). To this figure need to be added thousands of Polish army units retreating east from the German war front who were captured and imprisoned by the Soviets (see "Katyñ massacre" below), as well as group arrests of border guards, policemen, public servants, priests, boy scouts, etc, and individually arrested civilians who were put in prisons awaiting fake "trials" like my father. The total was almost two million people.

My father, who was General Manager of the Telephone and Telegraph Office in Piñsk, was already marked by Soviet communist ideology for extermination, as all public servants were regarded to be "class enemies" because they "served" the capitalist government.

During the night of 22-23 February 1940 my father, aged 45, was arrested in Pinsk by four Soviet secret police officers of the NKVD (later known as KGB) in the middle of the night (this was standard communist method). The house was thoroughly searched.

For the following few days, in answer to my iquiries in person, the prison authorities were telling me that they never heard of my father and had no record of his arrest. But later, reacting to my persistent representations, NKVD admitted that my father was arrested but he was transferred to a prison in Miñsk, a larger regional town, where he is "awaiting trial". However they refused to accept a food parcel for my father and a change of underwear. That was all.  I never had any more news about my father since that time. I was a 16 year old schoolboy then. Six weeks later I myself was arrested and deported to Siberia.

My father perished in the Soviet Union, like thousands of other unknown Poles: nobody knows where, nobody knows when, nobody knows how.

However, it is a well known fact that after Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, the NKVD, retreating from Eastern Poland, were evacuating overcrowded prisons in great hurry and usually killed all imprisoned Poles right there in prisons instead of leaving them to the Germans.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Polish woman Joanna Januszczak, survivor of the Soviet massacre in Cherven, published a book in Poland around 1995 titled "Path of Death: Minsk - Cherven. June 24-27, 1941". Joanna Januszczak writes in her book that immediately after the Nazis launched an offensive against the USSR, some 5,000 people from prisons in Minsk (where my father was held) and Vileika, also Kowno, were crowded together and began being driven to the east. In a town called Cherven (Czerweñ), in Minsk region, the women and most of those who had served terms for real criminal offences, were separated from the crowd and were moved further east. The others, classified by communist ideology as class enemies, the enemies of people, or generally as "political" prisoners, like my father, were executed by NKVD firing squads 2 to 3 kilometers from the town. Those who remained alive after the firing were killed by shovels, testifies Ms. Januszczak. Only a few people survived.

Edward, aged 21, after spending in 1939 , our last Christmas Eve ("Wigilia") when the whole family was still together in Pinsk, said farewell on 1 January 1940 and left home to try to escape, like hundreds of other Poles, to the western part of Poland occupied by the Germans, where living conditions were much easier and chances of survival much better than under Soviet occupation.

However, he was caught by the Russians, crossing the border in the heavy snow near Bialystok, and for this crime was sentenced to 10 years hard labour. It must be said that Germany and Russia were at that time great friends and allies. Nevertheless Edward was sent to one of the Vorkuta gulags in the North, near the Arctic Circle (see image >>).

In the gulag he met our cousin Mietek Rymaszewski (Mieczyslaw 67.112) who similarly tried to escape communism. Mietek described their experiences of this episode in his memoirs. For link to his story Memoirs of Mietek, see further on below.
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Zygmunt, aged 19, my other brother, was arrested by the KGB (NKVD) on 15 March 1940 at home in Pinsk. What was his crime? He was the son of "the class enemy" - my father. From the prison in Pinsk he was moved to prison in Orsha, Brest district. They sentenced poor young Zyggi to forced hard labour in one of the Arctic Circle gulag camps called Vorkutlag in Komi Region. Like my father he did not survive.

After exterminating the men regarded as the "class-enemies", it was the Communist policy, to also eliminate their families, helpless wives and young children. This was done by their deportation to remote areas of the USSR, subjecting them to the exposure to severe climates, primitive living conditions, hard physical work, continuous hunger and starvation, and disease.

UNHEATED CATTLE TRUCKS BROUGHT TO THE RAILWAY SIDING IN PINSK READY FOR THE DEPORTEES >>>

On 13 April 1940 at the age of 16, I was arrested by the NKVD (KGB) in the night, near the very early morning, together with my younger brother Zbyszek, age 13, and my mother, age 45. Then we were escorted to the railway sidings at the freight area of the station and locked up in one of the trucks, ready for deportation. We were destined to forced hard labour on starvation diet in Northern Kazakhstan, Western Siberia. Approximate location is marked with red X.

The travel took nearly three weeks. We were all crammed into the unheated cattle trucks, 40 people per truck. Mostly women, wives of imprisoned men, and their children and a few elder relatives, together with some permitted personal possessions. We were packed like sardines and locked up for the duration of journey. Some people sat on raised platforms of rough boards each end of truck, unlucky ones were squatting on the floor underneath platforms. Near the middle of the truck there was a hole in the floor which served as a toilet without any privacy except for a bit of a ragged curtain.

The train was around 40 trucks long with two big steam engines, one pulling in front and the other one pushing at the back of the train. The slow dragging journey lasted 2 weeks and 3 days.

From Pinsk we passed Luniniec to Mikaszewicze, the former border town between Poland and USSR. We had to change there to another similar train because Soviet rail tracks were wider than European.

Then we went through Gomel, where my mother started to cry, calling out Anna, her mother, who was trapped in Soviet Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution and was buried there in Gomel. We continued to Konotop, Kursk, Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Michurinsk and Kazan.

Loading of victims into cattle trucks, marked with hammer and sickle emblems : the fear symbols
 
Soviet deportation train. Notice two young faces in the little opening with bars. Hidden camera captures the sealing of wagons and NKVD officers inspecting the train before departure.

At a stop in Kazan a local starving population, mostly of Tatar nationality, with outstreched hands were begging bread from us, the convict - deportees. Some of us were throwing their bread to the" free people of the Soviet paradise".

Usually our stops were not on railway stations but on the sidings nearby, and mostly at night. On the way we've passed similar transports of deportees from other Polish towns, heading east. Our engines were changed before climbing the Ural mountains.

Then we went past the Ural mountains to Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Petropavlovsk and finally Kokchetav, where we were unloaded some distance from the town and sat on the ground alongside the rail track.

Sweating in the overcrowded by humans cattle truck, then chilled by draughts while passing through the cold, snow covered Ural mountains, I developed pneumonia with needle pains and fever. There was no medical attention of any kind.

Snow covered Soviet train
with red star in front, passing Sverdlovsk

From Kokchetav the Polish women and their children were taken in lorries and scattered throughout 300 km area to various remote villages and "kolhoz'es" (collective farms). My mother, my younger brother and myself, with pain in the chest and a fever, were taken by open lorry 100 km away from the railway line to a district village Aryk - Balyk, where we sat on the ground waiting few hours for horse drawn carts ordered by the KGB from "local" kolhoz'es. Our cart drove us another 50 km away to a little village called Korsakovka, surrounded by endless steppe (picture below), arriving on 29 April 1940.

In Korsakovka 8 Polish women with 6 children were dropped off.   I had no treatment for my pneumonia. After five weeks (and some help from the locals - rubbing my chest with killed dog's fat - there was no other fat available) my young body recovered, but I was frequently coughing for the whole year. We had to work hard and sleep in the fields, 6 to 12 km away from the village, surrounded by vast empty steppes. The first year there were bad crops and militiamen were forcibly taking away from the Russian peasants whatever little stored grain they owned, in order to fulfill the compulsory State quota of "tax in kind" imposed on the kolhoz. The collective in those parts of Siberia could produce only wheat and hay. Members of the collective worked the whole year without pay. In the autumn the crops were delivered to government silos as tax and what was left, was divided among the kolhozniks in proportion to the amount of their "workdays". Then few crates of Russsian vodka was delivered to the kolhoz at nominal price, so that the slaves could get drunk, forget about last year and start again. That was the true Soviet socialist "workers' paradise" - not the lies portrayed by the Soviet financed socialist propaganda in the West.

All the time, myself, young Zbyszek and my mother, we were working from dawn to dusk alongside kolhozniks far in the fields away from the village, where we slept on the ground on some hay. The "pay" was 150 grams of bread and wheat dumplings soup twice a day (for breeakfast and after long day's work). The soup was eaten from round old-fashioned wash-basin type metal bowls allocated to 8 people per bowl. Each person was inserting in turn his dirty, private timber spoon into the basin and his saliva. The spoon was usually carried in owner's boot top to avoid it being stolen.

Because of our convict-deportee status we had no right to join the kolhoz. This meant that we were treated similarly to very rare independent farm workers in USSR, called "yedinolichniks". Of course we had to work, but according to rule (at least theoretically), we had "to pay high bazaar prices for food", i.e. for the piece of bread and flour dumplings soup while at work. After one year of hard labour I found out that I did not earn anything. Neither did my mother or brother. When in the autumn after the harvest  I asked for some wheat grain for my work, I was told, with laughter, that I was actually owing the kolhoz because "ty vsio prokushal " (you have eaten all what you've earned). (Picture: For most farm labour we used oxen >>)

If you were sick or not well and stayed "at home" in the village, you starved, because the communist doctrine stated "Kto ne rabotayet tot ne yest" (He, who does not work, does not eat). There was nowhere to buy the food. We exchanged for food whatever little clothing or possesions we had, but there was very little to exchange and not many Russians were willing to part with food.

Next year, on the 3 March 1941, we moved to a bigger nearby village (and kolhoz) Matveyevka, 10 kilometers away. Our movement was limited to 40 kilometers, under penalty of imprisonment. Considering very long distances between places in empty, sparsely populated Northern Kazakhstan steppes, with non-existing "public" transport (and there was no such thing as "private" transport, or anything "private" under communism), the limit wasn't very far.

In Matveyevka there were 13 Polish deported women and 14 children. During the first 21 months before I left them to go to the Army, three Polish women and five Polish children died in Matveyevka alone, from starvation and hard work. Similar story happened to all deported Polish women, and especially children, in every kolhoz in Kazakhstan.

Things got worse with time and after the outbreak of the 1941 German - Soviet war. My gums were bleeding and teeth were becoming loose from scurvy. My legs and neck were covered with ulcers resulting from semi-starvation. My worn out shoes were falling off, and my clothes were ragged and torn, and full of lice. My younger brother Zbyszek and mother suffered hunger, frost, hard work and all hardships, as all of us.

• Bronislawa (Bronka), who married Pawel SLOKA and had two girls and two boys, was also deported to USSR with her whole family. I have no details when. Her daughters were called Irka (Irena) and Lodzia (Ludmila?), and sons Rysiek (Ryszard) and Maniek (Marian?).
  
• Jadwiga (Jadzia) the youngest of my father's three sisters who married Feliks Sarnacki, was deported like all Rymaszewski families into the USSR with her two children, a girl Bogusia (Boguslawa) and a boy Gienek (Eugeniusz). Her husband Feliks was arrested by the Soviets beforehand and was missing without trace.

Czeslaw was called up with army reserve during mobilisation before the beginning of war in 1939 and was posted to Lachwa on the Russian border, where he commanded a detachment of KOP - the Polish frontier guards.

Two weeks later, when Soviets moved into eastern Poland, he was taken prisoner and sent to slave work in an iron ore mine in Russia's Donbas region. In June 1941 few days after Germany attacked Russia and bombed the industrial Donbas region, he escaped from the POW camp. The area was soon overrun by Germans. Under German occupation he returned home to Malkowicze in Poland. He found his house empty and learned about the fate of his whole family, as well as ours.

He worked, living alone in his house, but when the Russians came back to Poland in 1945, they tracked him down and imprisoned him again. He died in Soviet prison in 1946.

Emilia, my father's sister, was deported in June 1940 by the NKVD, with her 14 years old, youngest son Romek and her 65 years old husband's father Boleslaw, to a township called Kamen na Obi (Kamen on the river Ob), Altayskiy Kraj in the middle of Asian Siberia.

She was put to work in a factory. The 65 years old grandfather worked outside township on the river Ob, floating timber logs. When he no longer could work, he was left there by the Russians to die.

20 years old Witold was arrested in Malkowicze by the NKVD and sent to hard labour in one of the gulags inside the USSR. He survived the gulag and the war, and now lives in Poland. See "more".

18 years old Mieczyslaw, to avoid being arrested by the NKVD, decided in November 1939 to escape to the part of Poland occupied by the Germans where life was much safer and survival much easier. However, he was caught on the border near Lomza by the Russians (who were friends with the Nazis at that time) and arrested. To protect his mother, who was still living at home in Malkowicze, while his father was already imprisoned by the NKVD, he gave Russians a false name. He also lied, maintaining that he lives under German occupation in Warsaw, and that he was not escaping but was crossing into the Soviet controlled area. Although he was believed, he was nevertheless sentenced to 3 years hard labour for this, and was sent to Vorkuta gulag in the North to work cutting trees in the taiga forests. My brother Edward Rymaszewski (66.121), who was arrested on the border also for trying to leave the Soviet occupation, was sentenced to 10 years hard labour. He shared imprisonment and slavery with Mietek in the same gulag.

Mieczyslaw has written a personal account of his imprisonment by the Soviets, his hardships in Vorkuta gulags, and survival, in short memoirs called: "MEMOIRS OF MIETEK RYMASZEWSKI" It is a separate, self-contained section of this website. To have a look at the contents and return here click on the image.

During the war, the Germans advancing into Russia discovered in April 1943, the bodies of thousands of Polish officers buried in mass graves in Katyn, Russia. An independent Red Cross commission concluded that they had been killed by Soviet NKVD troops in the spring 1940, during Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, when around 25,000 Polish officers imprisoned by Russians disappeared. Katyn came to be a symbol of communist mass murder and (usual) communist official lies. The Communist Russia lied to the world, claiming that the massacre was committed by Germans. It was not until 1989, when the Russian government under Mr. Gorbachov admitted responsibility for this and other murders,

Ignoring all human and international military rights, on the orders of Stalin, 25,700 Polish officers were individually and bestially murdered by a revolver bullet to the back of the head.

They committed no crime. They were fighting the Nazis and while retreating were taken prisoner by the Russians.

The flower of Polish officer corps and intelligentsia was exterminated. It was political and ideological genocide. In 1943 the Allied leaders knew about it and said nothing. They did not want to antagonize Stalin.

Exhumed bodies of the Polish officers murdered in Katyn in April 1940.

• RYMASZEWSKI  Antoni, the son of Romuald. Born on 14 November 1902. Vice public prosecutor, in army uniform. Letter from Wilno (Vilnius) University, visiting cards, postcards (Ref. AM 2059), writing from 79 pp regiment (Ref. WO 2059, page 32).
  
• RYMASZEWSKI  Zenon, the son of Jan Rymaszewski and Zofia Michalowska. Born  on 16 July 1910 in Wilno. Building professional. Second Lieutenant of Army Reserve,  in uniform of 1 pp regiment. Identity disc, photograph (Ref. AM 3258). Left a son named Antoni. His surviving granddaughters Agnieszka and Maria Rymaszewska now live in Olsztyn, Poland.

• RYMASZEWSKI Franciszek, the son of Jan. Born in 1888. Sergeant (plutonowy) of  the Police Force, in uniform.

• RYMASZEWSKI Antoni, the son of Piotr and Anna. Born on 15 January 1913. He was a teacher in Stolpce. As a Lieutenant - Engineer in Army Reserve, mobilized before the beginning of war to the border guards (KOP) in Stolpce.
  
• RYMASZEWSKI Kasper, the son of Adam. Born on 19 January 1892 in Pasieki. Medical doctor in Wilno, in the rank of Captain. (Ref. 2708). His surviving daughter Anna now lives in Ottawa, Canada.
  
• RYMASZEWSKI Wladyslaw Jan, the son of Antoni. Born on 15 November 1891 in Nieswiez. Medical doctor, in rank of Colonel (Reserve). Wife: N. Rymaszewska. (Ref. 2709). (As far as I can remember, my father mentioned to me that he had a second cousin, our relative, who was a doctor and lived in Nieswiez. Could it be Wladyslaw?)

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