
The journal of Marianna Waszczuk from the village Czeremcha in Podlasie region was written at the time of the actual events, starting with the author’s deportation from her homeland to far-away Siberia. At its heart, this is a tale of a family that tenderly guards this small notebook, its pages filled with the careful handwriting of a bygone time. For Marianna Waszczuk’s children, Małgorzata Gąsiorowska and Janusz Kazberuk, and her granddaughter, Anna Łukaszewicz, these several dozen yellowish pages are a family treasure. Their story about their mother and grandmother shows how much importance they attach to the past and the conclusions they can draw from past events.
In the first entries of her journal, Marianna Waszczuk describes the moment of deportation. It is 19 June 1941. Marianna lives the life of an ordinary girl; she returns home from a dance party in her village and finds NKVD officials already there. They inform about the deportation and order her family to bring only the most necessary things. Her life falls to dust. The journey to Siberia lasts many weeks. Marianna, who comes from a family of railwaymen, very precisely describes the stations where the train with the deportees stops; she notes the times of arrivals and departures.
She also describes the next stages of her journey. Not by train but by ship from Novosibirsk, heading north on the river Ob. As she writes, the ship was overloaded; it was difficult to find a spot to sit down. Despite the difficulties of the journey, Marianna is still delighted by the glow of the moon reflecting on the water. The destination of this transport was a harbour in Parabel.
Marianna Waszczuk’s journal also consists of descriptions of the everyday labour of the women deported to Siberia. Their task was to collect resin from conifers using metal shovels and wooden buckets, working many hours every day. Their meal was 600 grams of bread and soup with groats or pasta. Besides that, the taiga fed them with mushrooms and berries. They worked on Sundays as well. Marianna emphasises the saddest thing to her – the impossibility of attending church services. She was not ashamed of her tears. She was also not ashamed of her sadness on the New Year’s Eve of 1942. She thought of those thousands kilometres away from her…
The diary contains no information about the reasons for Marianna and her mother’s deportation. The family memory is that the main reason was that they were Polish and Catholic. In particular, Janusz Kazberuk has no doubt that it was mainly Polish Catholics who were deported. His father was also “waiting” for deportation, but the German-Soviet war broke out and the deportations were interrupted. Marianna’s daughter, Małgorzata, points out that Marianna’s brother was in territories occupied by the Germans, where he fought for the partisans and wrote letters to his family in Czeremcha. Someone reported this to the Soviet authorities, and that was enough for the Soviets to deport both women. They assumed that people who had contact with relatives on the German side were spies.
Janusz Kazberuk adds that the Soviets had excellent information about the citizens of Poland, which they had occupied since September 1939. They had lists of people who were to be deported. They knew exactly in which houses they lived.
Speaking about the memory of her deported relatives, Anna Łukaszewicz, the granddaughter of the author of the journal, underlines that her grandmother’s Siberian story was always present in her home. Janusz Kazberuk adds that it is difficult for him to imagine how his mother must have experienced the tragedy of deportation. A nineteen-year-old girl, on the threshold of adulthood, dreaming about the future, when suddenly everything falls apart. “It’s terrifying how people can treat people like this – how cruel it was”, says Janusz Kazberuk.
Anna Łukaszewicz indicates her grandmother Marianna’s extraordinary will to live. Despite being forced to leave her homeland and travel into the unknown, she lived in hope of return. Her notes from the time spent in Siberia bear witness to the fact that she missed her homeland and the Polish language the whole time. Anna Jakubowska also stresses that there is a lot of hope and will to live in her grandmother’s journal. She is convinced that this will to live has somehow passed on to her as well. It is a message which says that you have to do something good with your life – for yourself, but also for other people.
The parts of the journal which depict the tragic situation of the deportees remain most strongly in the memory of Małgorzata Gąsiorowska, daughter of the author. Chopping wood in frost reaching -40 degrees Celsius, lack of food, a few people sharing one egg between them at Easter. At the same time, she is moved by her mother’s unwavering faith. She prayed for the whole period of her deportation; she always believed that God would not allow the deportees to be harmed and that they would return to Poland.
Marianna Waszczuk’s journal is not the only thing kept by her children. They also possess the document from the Soviet authorities that informed their mother and grandmother that they had been sentenced to 25 years of exile, during which they must report every ten days at the local NKVD office. Janusz Kazberuk does not know how his mother managed to take it back to Poland because documents like this were usually confiscated by the Soviet authorities when leaving the USSR.
Marianna Waszczuk returned to Poland in 1946, but her journal ends in 1943, when Poles deported into the depths of the Soviet Union were granted amnesty. In the absence of Marianna herself, this journal keeps her descendants’ memories of their mother and grandmother alive. This is why, a couple of years ago, Marianna’s granddaughter Anna had it digitized, from which three copies were printed. It became a Christmas present from Anna to Małgorzata Gąsiorowska and Janusz Kazberuk – Marianna’s children.
