Return to Siberia

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A few days ago, Tadeusz Kotlarz returned to Siberia. His first journey, sixty-five years earlier, was as a political prisoner. This time he travelled as a tourist from England, revisiting the places of his scarred youth.

In February 1940, half a million Polish citizens were ordered out of their homes at gunpoint, conducted to cattle trucks, and transported to distant fringes of the Soviet Union. Mr. Kotlarz’s family ended up in Khristoforovo, near Kotlas, in the Lalsk region of Siberia. He was only fourteen years old at the time.

“I was researching the deportations on a Russian internet site”, said Tadeusz, “when I came across Irina Dubrovina. She is the chairperson of a small organisation that tries to help former inmates of the Kotlas work camps. I just sent her an e-mail and we established contact. Then I revealed my intention of wanting to come for a visit”

We met Tadeusz as he arrived in Kotlas with Irina Dubrovina. He looks much younger than his 80 years. Sprightly, polite, well-dressed - a typical European - we took to him immediately. He had come all the way from Nottingham (England) by airplane via Warsaw and St Petersburg, and then taken a 24-hour train journey to reach Kotlas. All this to revisit the place where he had spent two years of his life. “You have to be of a certain age to understand why he would go to all this trouble”, explained Irina Dubrovina.

We wanted to show Tadeusz the “Makarikha” cemetery where many of the exiles were buried. By coincidence, some other (younger) people from Archangielsk had arrived that day looking for information about the camps, and they joined us.

As we stood before a small commemorative plaque, Irina told us of the thousands of Poles who had perished here. Tadeusz only nodded his head solemnly from time to time in agreement. Sometimes he would add a few words in English, or Polish or Russian.

We took him to a museum in Kotlas to see an exhibition of German contemporary painters. But Tadeusz was more interested in the exhibits about Russian life during the era when he was here.

Next day, we set off by car to Khristoforovo by agonizing, twisted roads. There were no available maps and no road signs to guide us. Several times, we lost our way along the tortured forest roads, and went round and round in circles for hours. The day was coming to an end and we had gotten nowhere.

Finally, by some miracle, we found it! And to Tadeusz’s astonishment, traces of the camp still remained. The wooden hut, which had served as the office (where exiles were allocated work), had survived. It looked just as had 60 years earlier. This was where the deportees had first disembarked from their cattle trucks from Poland. “It was the first thing I saw when I arrived here after three weeks of travel”, explained Tadeusz. “And it’s still here. And just beside the railway line, there used to be two wooden barrack houses (wooden shacks): a big one and a small one. We lived in the small one.” No traces of them remain today.

“Life was hard. We had to work every single day, except Sundays, from early morning to very late at night. Those who worked were given 400 grams of bread and something that looked like soup. Children and old people didn’t get anything and had to rely on their families to support them. Our family had brought some things from Poland with us. My mother sold them to the locals for potatoes when times were bad. Many people didn’t survive the first winter”.

After their release, the Kotlarz family (mother, father and four children) set out on the long road to Chelyabinsk, to find work. During the journey, they were met by Polish soldiers recruiting for the Polish army in Tatischevo (near Saratov). So the family immediately changed direction and made for Saratov, spending the winter labouring on a collective farm.

Tadeusz Kotlarz always wanted to return to Siberia to revisit the places of his memory, the places that still haunt his dreams. Now he has made that journey, and can relive his memories….

In 1940, one and a half million men, women and children from Eastern Poland classified as “undesirable” by the Soviet government, were deported at gunpoint into the forests of Siberia. Many of them perished. Those who survived were destined never to see their homeland again.

Anna Starcheva
Translated and adapted by
Ryszard Antolak.

© Dunskaya Pravda (Kotlas) July 2006