At the initiative of Barbara Sykulska, a history teacher, another meeting with people deported to Siberia was held at the Janusz Korczak II General Secondary School in Bolesławiec. The school hosted Mieczysław Petters and Benjamin Abramowicz. Both men spoke about what they experienced at the time. “I was not quite seven years old when it happened,” Petters said. “We were given two hours to get ready. We were allowed to take only 300 kg for the whole family.”
The deportees were put into freight cars. “There were no windows; it was dark,” Petters recalled. “The doors were opened once a day. We were given only water. We lived in such conditions for three weeks.”
Mr Petters spoke, among other things, about hunger, illness and working in inhumane conditions. He added that he survived thanks to... the local people. In the hospital where he was admitted after developing scurvy, a doctor of Polish origin took care of him. And when he was nearly beaten to death—only because he knew Pushkin’s poems by heart—two Chechens saved him.
“In a sense, I was lucky in my misfortune, considering what happened in Volhynia. The other thing is that later I was not allowed to say that I had been deported to the Soviet Union, only that I had ‘been evacuated because of the danger threatening me,’” Petters said in an interview with “ii”. “And I also regret that there were no rubbish bins like those now found in Poland in Siberia... Bins in which bread is strewn about.”
“Our students listened to these stories with great interest,” Barbara Sykulska said. “I believe that high school students should learn about living history, rather than rely solely on textbook knowledge,” she added. “This is not about our misfortunes,” the Siberian exile stressed. “It is about ensuring that these young people never experience anything like this.”
Biographies of the Siberian exiles, including Mr Mieczysław and Mr Benjamin, will soon be published in a book involving students from various Bolesławiec schools. We will return to the subject.
(information: ii)