Never enough bread
There was never enough bread...
“In Ostaszków, they ordered us to get off, and we continued our journey on a boat with barges attached. We soon saw an island with a large monastery, surrounded by a few other buildings. There were already Polish POWs there, and the more curious among them had discovered that earlier, Chinese prisoners had been held there, if we are to believe the writing they left on the walls of the monastery turned POW camp.
And thus began our prison life, among the indestructible lice and bedbugs that attacked us everywhere by the thousands — on out four- and six-story bunks, at night and during walks, even during our starving meals. There was never enough bread, and soup was made of fish that had not been gutted. My memory also suggests one better meal, prepared for the anniversary of the October Revolution: a larger ration of bread, sugar and even tobacco. Neither I nor my father smoked cigarettes, so we traded the tobacco for bread at ate our full, “celebrating” with a content stomach for the first time since we had left Brześć [...]*
Stefan Nastarowicz
* Translated excerpt from Stefan Nastarowicz, „Powrót do Katynia”, published by Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, Rzeszów, 1990.
Poles in the Soviet camp. Drawn by Stefan Starzyński, based on his own experiences.
The Camp on the island
Stefan Nastarowicz was 14 years old in September 1939, when he and his father, a Łódź police officer, were taken prisoner by Soviet forces. The Nastarowicz's were taken to Brześć, and then through Babynino, Pawliszcze Bór and Bołogoje to the camp in Ostaszków.
The boy was released from the camp a few weeks later, on November 21st. He left with a piece of paper hidden in his schoolboy hat, and on it were the addresses of 91 Łódź families, whom he was to inform of their relatives' internment in the POW camp in the USSR.
Postcards from Ostaszków would still arrive in Łódź in 1940, advising relatives to ask young Nastarowicz for information on the camp.
The pocket calendar full of notes that the boy smuggled out of the camp was for over half a century the only existing (but kept hidden, in case of a search by the secret police) authentic document regarding the camp for Polish POWs, located on Lake Seliger, near the Wielkie Łuki — Bołogoje railway. About a dozen kilometers from the town of Ostaszków, on Stołybnij Ostrow, an island a few hectares in size, there was a 17th century monastery. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Orthodox church and monastery were closed. In 1920, Polish POWs were brought to the island, and the 9000 prisoners brought there in 1939 were also put into the monastery.
Towards the end of September, the first shipments numbering hundreds of prisoners arrived. They were transported from Ostaszków onto the island by boat. Most of them were police officers, gendarmes, members of the Border Defense Corps, border guards, prison guards and employees, intelligence and counterintelligence officers, prosecutors and judicial branch employees, as well as reserve officers of the Polish Army. A few shipments included civilians: railwaymen, work troop volunteers, army colonists and their families, postal service workers.
Interrogations, which were conducted from the very beginning, made possible a systematic decrease in the camp's population; some prisoners (privates, those born on territory occupied by the Germans) were sent to the General Government or to work in the Reich. Privates were released, as were those born in the former eastern borderlands of Poland, which had been renamed Western Belarus and Western Ukraine after the Soviet invasion of 1939. 1470 were sent to Kryvyi Rih, while an undetermined number were transferred to camps in Kozielsk and Starobielsk. According to Soviet registrations lists, on December 1st, there were 5963 people in the Ostaszków camp, including 105 civilians.
On April 4th, 1940, a shipment of 494 prisoners was sent to Kalinin (present day Tver). There would be over twenty such transports, the last one leaving May 13th.
