Cannoneer Franciszek Łuksza, born in 1924, bachelor.
On 13 April 1940, I was arrested and taken to the USSR with my family (mother and sister). They transported us as opasnyy element [a dangerous element]. My father had been arrested earlier, in November. I was traveling in a freight car that accommodated over 30 people along with their possessions. During the journey, they separated me from my family. I remained alone.
After a 20-day journey, I found myself in Kazakhstan, in the Pavlodar oblast, Kuybyshev district, on a collective farm. This collective farm was inhabited by people from Bessarabia. The village lay on an empty steppe. The steppe was covered with dry grass everywhere, as far as the eye could see. The accommodation and all buildings were made of clay. Dry grass and straw were used for the fuel. The boss of this collective farm gave us old accommodation abandoned by the indigenous population. Then we had to pay for what they asked for, in money or in things. We paid huge sums. They did not allow to do us any work, because they wanted us to get rid of our belongings from home as soon as possible.
After some time they moved me to the state farm for forced labor. I worked on the construction of cowsheds for cattle. We built them from large bricks, which we made earlier. There were only Poles at the construction site, mostly women. There were almost no men, because the husbands or fathers were in the camps.
One old Polish man died, and the local offices did not want to provide any planks for the coffin. They took out the cross from the grave of a Polish women who had been buried there and destroyed it.
I lived in an unfinished barn. It had no roof and no windows, only walls. I earned up to one hundred rubles a month. Workers could buy 800 grams of bread. You couldn’t buy anything [more] because there was nothing else. Those who did not make the quotas received less bread. I worked eight hours a day. After work, I caught fish and collected buckwheat because there was nothing to eat.
There was no way we could get hold of a newspaper, book or even listen to the radio. As for the meetings, they drummed it into us that we would not return to Poland, that we would stay with them forever, that Poland would never rise again, etc. They tried to persuade us about their constitutions and boasted about their prosperity. After a few months we got Soviet passports. It was not possible to go anywhere with this passport.
From time to time, I wrote and received letters from friends and relatives in Poland. Having postal communication with the homeland, I got my mother’s address. It was 300 km away from where I was. At the beginning of winter, I escaped from that state farm and headed to my mother, because the NKVD did not want to let me go. After joining my family, I was in a collective farm again. There I was sent for a tractor drivers’ course. It took place in the evenings. I worked all day, and in the evening I had to go to this course. I had to attend under threat of being taken to court.
Once, when I started the motor, the crank hit me and dislocated my arm. I received four days off from the doctor, though I could not use my arm for a few weeks. I worked with one hand. Someone ended up in court for seriously damaging the tractor. They kept on claiming that it had been done on purpose, although the driver was not to blame. The machines were old. They used a lot of fuel. For using more than the quota, fuel was paid for in cash, with the result that I worked almost for free.
That’s how I worked until the amnesty. The day of the amnesty was for me a day I had not experienced before, a day of indescribable joy. After some time, information began to circulate about the organization of the Polish army in Buzuluk. Everyone had the word Buzuluk on their lips. After an unsuccessful trip to Buzuluk, I waited for the day when I could become a Polish soldier. This came on 25 February—on this day I got called to the army, and on 20 March I put on my uniform. I stood in the ranks of the Polish army.