Tag #107220 - Interview #78446 (Feliks Nieznanowski)

People of leftist views, on the other hand, like my brother, said, ‘It’s the Soviet Union, the only salvation, we’ve got to save ourselves.’ And they boarded the freight cars, but not under escort, under guard. We rode for four weeks. We knew we were going into the Russian interior, to work, but as volunteers. On our way we stopped at several cities and there were the so called ‘delousing stations’ because lice were eating us away. Those are the kind of steam baths where they take your clothes away for boiling. They killed the lice to prevent typhus. Everyone stripped down completely, gave the clothes away for boiling, and took a bath. We went several times through such quarantine. After such bathing the lice actually came back to life, growing even faster than before, as they had what they liked – heat. And with such luggage, through the delousing stations, we got to the Ural, to Magnitogorsk [city in eastern Russia, in the Ural region, major industrial center, symbol of Stalinist industrialization].

In Magnitogorsk, they welcomed the newcomers, they didn’t say ‘from Poland,’ but ‘from Belarus,’ who ‘want to be building the Magnitogorsk industrial complex with us.’ Some people survived that way.