Author(s): Oganowska-Coates, Halina

NZ Biography & Memoir

'As a child I loved my mother but she seemed different from other mothers. She didn't know how old she was. She couldn't remember where she was born. I wondered what had happened to her that she could have forgotten such important things. It had something to do with the Second World War...'Krystyna is one of 732 'Polish children' who survived forced deportation to the soviet Union and was given a home in New Zeland in 1944. Her remarkable story, a composite portrait drawn from interviews with Polish survivors, begins in a peaceful Polish village and follows her family's harrowing journey to a lobour camp in Siberia, the terrible flight to freedom, and Krystyna's lonely voyage to a safe refuge in New Zealand.This is a beautifully evoked account of a child's journey through Europe at war, and a young women's bewildering encounter with rural New Zealand.