"I wake up at five and queue for bread and soup"

The night of the 9th to the 10th of February 1940 defined the rest of my mother's life, just as the outbreak of Warsaw Uprising would for my father. She was 12 years old.

On that night, eighty years ago, the apparatus of Soviet repression, the NKVD, came for my mother's family, took the three sisters and their parents by horse-drawn sleigh to the railway station at Antonówka. They had been given less than an hour to gather up belongings. Once at the station, they saw many other Polish families that had also been rounded up at gunpoint; they were put into cattle wagons and the train was taken to Sarny, a significant railway junction town 25km to the east. Here, cattle wagons from across the region, all full of Poles, were joined together to form a longer train that was destined for the labour camps of the Soviet Union.

The train was to take them over 1,800 km north-east to a place called Punduga, in the Vologda Oblast. From the station at Punduga, they walked 8km through virgin snows to a camp, Spetsposylok 17, where in primitive conditions they had to cut down trees in the surrounding forests. There were around 400 Poles there. My mother was judged too young to work in the forest, so she cooked and cleaned for her sisters (aged 14 and 16) and parents who spent all day sawing lumber. They were among 140,000 Polish citizens deported that night. There would be three more waves of deportations of Poles before the Nazi invasion of the USSR, between 500,000 (conservative estimate) and 1,400,000 people (upper estimate).

The first wave of deportees were former Polish state officials, railway workers, and - in the case of my grandfather and his family - forestry workers. They were considered dangerous to the Soviet state, which had been imposed upon the lands invaded by the Red Army after 17 September 1939. Forests, it was believed by the NKVD, is where partisans would hold out; forestry workers knew the forests, and so they were suspect, dangerous - and so were their children in the twisted paranoid logic of the Soviets.

To this day, Russia continues to lie about the reasons for the outbreak of WW2. Had there not been a Hitler-Stalin pact, Hitler would not have attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, nor would Stalin have attacked eastern Poland 17 days later. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is entirely unable to put a narrative spin on why hundreds of thousands of Poles - including large numbers of women and children, met such a fate.

According to the Russian narrative, Russia was not at war at the time. 'The Great Patriotic War', as Russia insists on calling it, began on 22 June 1941. But before then? Between the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact on 23 August and Hitler giving the order to invade the USSR, the two dictatorships carved up Europe between them. Hitler invaded seven countries (Poland, France, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway), Stalin six (Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania). Hitler and Stalin could do so with impunity, knowing the other would not attack in the meanwhile. And this was all going on with Germany receiving Soviet raw materials - fuel for the Luftwaffe that was bombing London was coming from the USSR - and timber from the Russian north.

Reparations - I'm glad that Kaczyński has stated that war reparations need to come from Russia as well as Germany. National atonement is key, more important than money. It would be unthinkable to erect a statue to Hitler in Germany. Only a tiny lunatic fringe celebrates him. In Russia is it commonplace to praise Stalin and to see new statues going up.

Below: letter sent by my mother to her friends, still living in Horodziec. This is a photocopy, so slightly unclear, but the gist is there. She describes life in the camp: up at five am to queue for bread and soup, "rye bread 1 rouble 20 kopeks., white bread for 2 roubles 10 kopeks. Soup - a plate of oily water with noodles, 41 kopeks. I have to clean the floors and windows, then go out to forage for berries; lunch is at noon, another queue, then washing clothes then another queue at six pm".

Below: the second side; she describes the buildings in the camp, including a nursery for children "between three months and three years". My mother has lost weight; she'd down to 38kg, "I am like a midge"; she signs off by apologising for her 'scribblings', because one forgets how to write in Polish.

The trauma experienced by my mother in the long winter's journey in a locked cattle truck, from which dead babies were removed, resulted in her living with claustrophobia. She never flew, once London Transport stopped using open-platform buses, she could only walk to work. She wouldn't use lifts nor cars with electric windows or central locking.

Fuck the USSR. And fuck anyone that glorifies Stalin.

This time last year:
Getting over this year's flu

This time two years ago:
War and the absence of war

This time four years ago:
Sensitivity to spiritual evolution

This time five years ago:
75th anniversary of Stalin's deportations of Poles

This time six years ago:
Peak Car (in western Europe at least)

This time seven years ago:
Pavement for Karczunkowska NOW!
[I still walk through mud or dice with speeding cars.]

This time eight years ago:
Until the Vistula freezes over 

This time nine years ago:
Of sunshine, birdsong and wet socks

This time 12 years ago:
Dziadzio Tadeusz at 90