Elżbieta Wrzosek

"I really learned my lesson. I had to work as a teacher in a camp. The Soviets called me, they frightened me at the beginning but after that they asked politely. They told me I could be very helpful teaching the prisoners in the camp school. They said “ For sure very few student will come. They will come just to look at you” ( people used to say I was quite pretty). “They will stay with you for a day at school so they will stop wandering around and committing stupid crimes around the camp”. People were ready to kill themselves, they were drinking and doing terrifying things in the camp so the Soviets forced me to work here. I was in the camp three times a week. About fifty prisoners used to take part in my lessons. I got friendly with them and they turned out to be really nice prisoners. I helped them as much as I could. The most important thing I could do for them was taking and bringing letters. According to the camp regulations, the prisoners were allowed to send letters once every three months or once every six. I took the letters always when they asked me. I often carried about twenty or thirty letters. Every time passing the guards, I had this silly smile on my face. Naturally, nobody never inspected me. To make it more exciting, I must say that it wasn’t a kind of camp for political prisoners but for sexual ones. My superior was a headmaster of the school".

"The Soviets camps were just dreadful. One boy from the other camp used to visit me from time to time. He was very nice Ukrainian boy. I looked after him. When he was sixteen he left his home village, starving, to find a job in a town. He intended to earn some money and send it to his parents who stayed in the village but he didn’t manage to earn any. He borrowed the money and after two months somebody came and said: ‘Give the money back’. ‘I don’t have them’ – he answered. They told him: ‘We’ve got something to take care of, you come with us’, so he did. They were plundering the shop while he had to watch the place around if anbody came. The police caught them and he was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for the group robbery. I used to bring some things for him to the camp. After a few months, I found out my boy Dzima spiting something out. He avoided meeting me and seemed to be embarrassed. He became a wretched men. I don’ really know what happened to him, he stopped visiting me. In general those prisoners were very grateful people. It’s difficult to describe what special kind of people they were. Once I came to the camp in tears because my baby – Tereska was dying of an inflammation and I had no medicine to save her. The baby was dying and there were no medicine, no doctors, nobody, nothing! The prisoners asked: “Dear Elizawieta, what happened? What happened to you?’. “My baby is dying of an inflammation”- I answered. They asked: “Why didn’t you tell us?’. Russia in that time and even now is a kind of a strange country. It really is and I can’t understand it. Can you imagine this – in no longer than thirty minutes I had everything I needed – a bottle of spirit, the medicines that were impossible to buy – the penicillin, the streptomycin. It was forty-five years ago, those medicines were just not available. I got some fruits as well while we weren’t used to eating much fruit, as it was too difficult to buy them. All of a sudden I had full bag of fruits. They packed the whole bag up with the fruits, the spirit, the medicine and some other things. Only those people in the camp knew where it came from. Because I worked in the camp, I spent the time with the prisoners, I treated them well– Tereska stayed alive".