The newly-reconstitued Polish state took control, according to the author, with a brutal vengance:
{
58} During the course of several years, from August 1933 until the end of 1939, the Polish authorities initiated mass arrests around all of Western Belarus. This occurred even here in Divin. All of those suspected of revolutionary activity, which had campaigned for the idea of communism, were subject to arrest. Punitive police units appeared in Divin. They made arrests among our population. They freely destroyed everything they wanted if they suspected someone. They broke windows, toppled ovens, tore roofs off houses. Those that were arrested were tortured in various ways: beaten half to death, had their hair torn out, had water and kerosene pumped into their noses, and had their fingers broken. The punitive squads tried in any way to break the morale of these people. They tried to isolate them from people. They tried to make submissive people and informants out of them.
On the way out of Brest, toward Baranovichi, there is a station called Bereza. Five kilometers from the station there were ruins of an
old Catholic monastery of the Carthusian Order. The people called them [the monks] simply
Kartuzovs. In its time, the monastery became famous through a cruel, bloody regime. People were beaten and tortured there. These people, who had turned away from Catholicism, were tortured in this monastery. After this, they became obedient, downtrodden slaves or traitors. All of this happened a long time ago, 300 years in the past.
In our time, in 1933,
Józef Piłsudski ordered
a concentration camp for political prisoners to be built on the site of the ruins. He decided to restore the regime of the old monastery.
The Bereza Kartuska station is located at a distance of 90 kilometers from us.
The repressions and cruelty of the Polish government gave way to the realization that conditions facing the peasants required action, and a land-reform program was begun and partly completed.
The struggle of the workers of Western Belarus, under the leadership of the communists, did not end, despite all of the repression of the Belopoles. The economic difficulties facing the country continued to grow. The Polish government began to realize that they had to take some sort of measures. It decided to introduce some sort of corrections to the land question, as the question of ownership of land was the most important for villagers. The Polish authorities decided to improve the life of the land-hungry peasants. For this they decided to create a new measure and division of the land.
This work began in 1937 in our Divin. To this end, they began to try
komosatsiyu, the so-called
scalenie gruntów [Polish:
land consolidation]. The principle of this work: existing separate plots were eliminated. In their place, the intention was to create a different system of peasant farms: a farm hamlet.
In many villages and towns around Divin this had already been done. Some of the people were already living under the new system of hamlets. Many people liked this and it satisfied them for some time.
Under this system, each farm owner received a hamlet allotment – a single piece of land. In extreme cases, two; and sometimes, the owner would receive three plots in three different places.
In the course of two-and-a-half years there were 5 engineers working in Divin. They were measuring and evaluating the lands. This was the biggest and most important work, and had been completed. What remained was just to distribute the hamlets among the peasants and to enter them into a registry. After this, it was necessary {
59}
to create an overall plan of Divin with the numerous hamlets and the names of their owners. But this whole idea collapsed due to the invasion of Poland by the Germans.
In 1939, in Divin there were about 900 peasant farms. In the long term, these farms would be fragmented and increased.
and the pre-reform fragmentation of peasant's holdings continued in the long term.
