carts from the nearby villages had been requisitioned to transport baggage and refugees to the railway station. Both children and older people were sobbing. Some of the refugees, single men without families, were detained at the barracks on [34] Piotra i Pawła Street. They were accused of … illegal crossing of the border … after as many as nine months spent in Lvov. They were summarily sentenced to several years of forced labour in the interior of the USSR and deported soon after. The local authorities and Ukrainian policemen abused their power during the deportation of the refugees as they were sheltering many nationalists among themselves. There were many instances of deportation of former political prisoners who had spent many years in Polish prisons and had devoted their entire life to the communist cause. Even though the party authorities and the MOPR were trying to rescue them, the militia functionaries put them in the wagons by force. Some friends of mine told me that there were many instances of the Ukrainian militia functionaries beating the refugees […] surely former OUN members and […] terrorist nationalists. The hygienic conditions in the trains that took the refugees to their exile [35] were horrible. The people had no place to wash or relieve themselves and were squeezed in like cattle without sufficient access to fresh air. The wagons were sealed. Those were the conditions in which tens of thousands of people travelled for many weeks to their destination: Kazakhstan, Siberia, the Komi Republic,601 the far north, and the vast taigas. For a number of days subsequently regular manhunts for refugees were conducted on the streets, in residential buildings, parks, and nearby forests where they were hiding … Some managed to avoid exile. Fortune is a strange thing. We had done everything to avoid deportation but now many of us – scarce survivors – regretted not having been deported back then. No Siberia, no most strenuous labour in a taiga, in Kazakhstan or a wild desert inhabited by half-savage tribes, or at felling in Arkhangelsk [36] could be equated to the excessive, bestial barbarity of modern Kulturträgers602 and “Europe’s saviours”. During the first months the exiles sent horrifying letters. Most of them worked at felling. Not accustomed to such hard labour many became ill. It was piecework and the remuneration was insufficient even to buy enough bread.
