Vasilina Mesárová, rozená Ljachová

"There were Russian border guards walking on their side, they saw us and picked us up. They took us and we didn't know where to, until they put us in the camp, which was already full of them. Even the girls and boys we knew from the villages we were from, so we met there together. The conditions were terrible. Six hundred grams of bread and a pint of soup a day. It was a kind of unfinished shed, and everyone who found a place there slept on the floor."

"That was us in court and they found out why we came, that we were no rich people or no scholars or no God knows what - well young girls of seventeen. Well, they gave us three years, and that we would go to Siberia to work. And when they sentenced us, we were still in jail for a month, and then they took us all away. We went there by train. And we went through four more prisons. And from Kharkov they took us, we went by cattle train to Karaganda for fourteen days. How many times we drove all night and how many times we stood for twenty-four hours on the spot. - Eat? We were given a piece of bread and a bucket of soup, so we had to share."