Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

overcrowded train carriage after 27 days, they were in Uzbekistan, 100
miles from the Chinese border.
They were sent to live in stables spattered with manure, which was the
only source of fuel. Waclaw still has the cheerful advice of a Soviet soldier
ringing in his ears: ‘Don’t worry. You will get used to it. And if you don’t
get used to it, you will die.’
The boys were lucky. Their aunt was a dental surgeon whose skills were
valuable. ‘If she pulled out the tooth of a Russian, she got half a kilo of
butter, a chicken or a bag of potatoes and this kept us going.’
Others were not so lucky. Of the 1.6 million Poles deported into far-flung
outposts of the Soviet Union’s gulag system, approximately a million died
of cold, starvation and disease.
There was a seismic mood swing when news broke of the German
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Soviets suddenly needed
their captive Poles, so they were freed to join a Polish army mustering
under General Anders, who was released from the Lubyanka prison in
Moscow, where he had been tortured, to fight with theRed Army.
For young Polish deportees, the only problem was how to join up. Railway
carriages were clogged with wounded Soviet soldiers, permission to travel
was hard to secure and distances were unimaginably vast.
Anders made things harder by taking the first wave of volunteers to Persia.
Among them were the Gasiorowski boys, who travelled through
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. On the way, Andrzej was separated from
his mother and acknowledged that it had known all along who had been
the true perpetrators of the Katyn Massacre.
Most, though not all of the graves in Ukraine, have since been exhumed.
In 2000, Andrzej went to Kharkov to see the opening of the mass grave
where his father was believed to have been buried. The bodies there had
been buried in clay and failed to decompose.
To hide the atrocity, the NKVD returned to the grave with massive
drilling devices and punched holes in the ground to aerate the grave and
encourage decomposition. In the process, they destroyed the bodies.
‘You can imagine how I felt when it was opened,’ says Andrzej softly. ‘The
only way they could tell how many dead there were was by counting the
skulls which had remained intact. Out of the 4,500 buried in Kharkov, we
were only able to find 150 bodies. The rest was a mess.’
Andrzej has spent more than 60 years in his adoptive country. He married
an Englishwoman and had three children who speak only pidgin Polish.
He thinks he survived the hell of two Siberian winters because ‘someone
above decided that I could do something useful’.
Twenty years ago he founded the Association of Katyn Families Abroad,
which has about 2,000 members. Now that the mood is changing towards
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