1. Personal data (name, surname, rank, age, occupation, and marital status):
Platoon Sergeant (infantry reserve) Bazyli Piróg, 35 years old, accountant in the municipal office in Mościski, married, two children.
2. Date and circumstances of arrest:
On 10 December 1940 in the town of Dolina, near Stryj, while living with my parents-in-law, the Czapelskis, I had a habit of listening to radio stations from abroad, in particular from London, with the curtains drawn. In the prison in Stanisławów, I learned that I was considered a dangerous citizen for the Soviet state because, in a conversation with a communist who had come from the Kiev region, I had given the following answer to his coarse speech about Poland: Poland will exist, the Polish nation will exist; it is a West Slavic nation with its own history and rich literature, with Western culture, as evidenced by the Latin alphabet and religion, and the crown on the eagle means that Polish kings were crowned like the kings of Western European countries; as an independent country, Poland has been educating its young people for more than 20 years from the first grade of primary school to the end of university, and “it was not so when there was Polsha [Russian name for Poland]” – all this while going around the cottages almost daily, writing down economic statistics.
3. Name of the camp, prison, forced labor site:
The sixth Vyatlager point, in the northern part of the Kirov Oblast, in the woods – lesopoval [tree-felling site] in winter, and peat bogs in spring. It was considered to be a shtrafnoy lager [penal camp].
4. Description of the camp, prison, etc. (area, buildings, living conditions, hygiene):
In the middle of wild fir forest, barracks made of planks, black single-plank beds, rife with bugs. In summer, mosquitoes made it impossible to sleep or to eat. Once a week, there was a compulsory bath and disinfection of bedding (a single blanket) and of clothes.
5. Composition of POWs, prisoners, exiles (nationality, category of crimes, intellectual and moral level, mutual relations, etc.):
Predominantly zhuliky [hoodlums] from the vicinity of Moscow and Leningrad, a few old Russian political prisoners, a few Georgians, very few Poles, some convicts from the Lwów and Stanisławów voivodeships [arrested] for crossing the border and transferring weapons (even bayonets).
6. Life at the camp, prison, etc. (daily routine, working conditions, quotas, wages, food, clothing, social and cultural life, etc.):
Forced labor from sunrise to sunset, down to minus 45 degrees. Below minus 46 degrees – labor at the lager zone, as it was called. Pay depended on filling the quota; otkazchiki [prisoners refusing to work] were put in jail. Shtrafnyi talon [penal voucher]: 300 grams of bread a day, with a meager watery soup in the morning and in the evening; stakhanovskyi talon [Stakhanovite voucher, named after the model Soviet worker Alexey Stakhanov]: 900 grams of bread a day, a good breakfast, dinner, and supper.
Clothing: donkey jackets, wadded bryuki [trousers], wadded caps, felt-and-leather boots. Marching (razvod) to work, 12 kilometers, to the tune of a concertina and a radio. At the kultklub [cultural club], nothing but diagrams – graphs showing the brigades’ work, lectures about the methods of felling trees, two papers with Marxist articles that could only be read by a convalescent who was exempted from work for some time by the hospital doctor.
7. The NKVD authorities’ attitude towards Poles (interrogation methods, torture, punishments, Communist propaganda, information about Poland, etc.):
I saw just one case where a Polish teacher was stripped naked in freezing weather for categorically refusing to work. Polaki kulturniye i gramotniye [Cultured and smart Poles]. The quality of Polish goods was emphasized and highly valued. The Zhulyki assaulted Poles even in the toilet and ripped their clothes off. The NKVD said that Poland would exist, but it would be red.
8. Medical aid, hospitals, mortality (list the names of the dead):
Good medical aid, mostly from male and female Volga Germans. From around 150 people struck down with scurvy, diarrhea, pneumonia, frostbite, or injuries in the woods, there were around two dead per day, mostly young zhulyki because of pneumonia. As for Poles, I can recall one death, which was Zborowski, deported from Kamianets-Podilskyi in 1933.
9. How did the contact with one’s country and family look, if there was any?
One letter and one parcel up to 8 kilograms total every two weeks. Letters written in Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian were delivered, those in Polish weren’t. There was a letter in Polish in the parcel from my wife – they didn’t give it to me. As for money, it was possible to send 100 rubles per month, if you fully reached the labor quotas.
10. When were you released and how did you reach the army?
[I was released] on 29 August 1941, while choosing an oblast permitted by the amnesty. When I was working at the kolkhoz near the town of Kurgan, I went to the voyenkomat [military commissariat] with my friends and I received a collective ticket to Buzuluk. In Chelyabinsk, we got into a convoy, and the entire transport was taken not to the Polish army, but to the kolkhozes south of the Aral Sea (Kungrad). It was only in February 1942, in the town of Turktul on the Amu Darya river, that our commission came up for recruitment.
Temporary quarters, 18 February 1943