[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Deportations

[LMPauling]

> There is a lot being said about Volhynia. Does anyone know what happened
> in middle Poland and the villages near Warsaw? This saw major battles
> early in the war.


Between the years of 1995 and 1998, I interviewed a number of people who
came from RusPoland in the areas of Lipno, Sierpc, and Wloclawek. These
interviews were transcribed and collected in a book, a copy of which I
donated to the SGGEE library.

Because of the current interest in the deportation prior to WWI, I will try
to excerpt some portions.

Olga Jabs was born in the city of Sierpc in August 1900 and lived in Poland
until 1920. She was 89 years old when I interviewed her.

She told me that she was 12 years old when the family was sent to Russia.
She together with her mother and older brother went by train as far as
Warsaw. She said it was winter time. They then were sent to the city of
Saratov. When I asked if there were a lot of Germans there, she said, "Yes,
but they were Russian Germans. They were nice. And when I got confirmed, I
was like the smallest. All of them big... special the Russian Germans. They
were all big people." Olga was confirmed in 1916 at Evang.-Luther. St.
Marien-Kirche in Saratow. She thought there were about 300 kids confirmed
with her.

She said they stayed there 4 years, and told me  "I made myself 16, and I
got a job making cigarettes. So I was wrapping cigarettes.... Then I thought
I could make more money. I went down the river on the boat and we shoveled
rye. I made myself sixteen, but I wasn't sixteen. Thirteen."

"And my uncle was a gendarmes so he got a freight car so my mother and her
sister came back."

I asked her if her home was still there when she got back to Sierpc, and she
said, "half.... ripped it apart... My best friend. She was married to a
Polish guy, so she was not taken. She was wearing my mother's clothes, and
she said she bought them. That was my mother's friend."

Later she repeated, "When we came back, everything was destroyed...The woman
was living there. She dyed all the clothes my mother had. My mother took her
to court, because my mother wanted the clothes. And she fell on her knees,
and she swore that was her clothes. But in the seam you can see the old
color.... She had to move out. The Scheune where you put the rye in was
there, but some was destroyed. Because that was built from not from wood,
that was there. But the barn was built from wood, so they burned it for
fire."

"When we came from Russia we didn't have nothing. We came in the spring.
Everything was planted and we didn't get any. The clothes what we got from
Russia, that's what we had."

Olga Jabs immigrated to the USA and lived in Connecticut until her death in
1998.

This is one example of the interviews I did. If you are interested, I could
post excerpts from others in separate posts.

Linda Pauling