Barbara Klein recalled years later: “at 2 a.m., there was a knock on the door. Russian soldiers arrived … They ordered us simply to pack (…). They carried my grandparents, who were already old, on chairs and threw them onto a truck. (…) They didn’t let them take many things, just the essentials. (…) And in the meantime, still during the night, Grandma’s sister Constance had a heart attack, an hour before they came for us. And she died.”

Engineer Edward Klein, a veteran of the Polish-Bolshevik war, ran a FIAT representative office in Bialystok. In 1939, he was mobilised into the army. The Soviets murdered him at Katyn together with his brother Jan, a lieutenant colonel in the Polish Army and a cavalier of the Virtuti Militari War Order. His younger brother Jerzy (a doctor) was killed near Osowiec while dressing a wounded soldier. Edward’s wife Olga, together with their four-year-old daughter Basia, parents and sister, were deported to Kazakhstan. Olga, together with Basia and Elżbieta, returned to Poland in 1946, her parents having died on inhuman land.