Disgusting and Hopeless

Abstract

Born in 1912 in the city of Sosnowiec, in southern Poland, Maria Norciszek was 27 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. Before the war, she worked for several military organizations in the city of Katowice. After learning of her impending arrest by the Gestapo, she fled to the city of Lwów, in eastern Poland, which had been invaded by the Red Army. There she joined the Union for Armed Struggle [Związek Walki Zbrojnej], the underground army formed after the two invasions. Alarmed at the arrests taking place in the Soviet zone, she fled, along with her husband, in April 1940. They were betrayed near the Romanian border and turned over to the NKVD. “ From that moment,” she writes, “began the terrible gehenna of my life.” Her time in Soviet captivity included confinement in four different prisons and a labor camp in Mariinsk, in the Novosibirsk oblast, where Tsivirko and the mother of Ibragimova (chapters 5, 8) were also incarcerated (Map 1).