1 November 1944: Arrival of New Zealand's First Refugees

On 1 November 1944 New Zealand's first refugees arrived in the harbour of Wellington: 732 Polish children with their 102 guardians. Together they had shared the fate of 1.7 million Poles who had been ethnically cleansed from their homes in eastern Poland by the Russian Secret Police, under Stalin's orders at the start of World War II, and deported in cattle wagons to forced labour camps thousands of miles away throughout Siberia and the Arctic Circle. Life was brutal - subzero temperatures, constant hunger, disease and death surrounded them. Of the 1.7 million, 1 million died and 200,000 are still unaccounted for in Stalin's genocide. This group of children, mostly orphans or having lost family members, were the lucky ones. Through the tides of wartime politics they fled from their bondage, found temporary refuge in Iran, and were finally offered a safe and permanent home in New Zealand.

Their story is one of remarkable survival against all odds in war and successfully integrating into a foreign country, and has been published in 2004 under the title "New Zealand's First Refugees: Pahiatua's Polish Children". I borrowed the book from Halina, my student, who's the granddaughter of one of the Polish guardians. Today she will drop by for her last lesson of Polish grammar. I'm going to miss these tutorials, because it's been a lot of fun for me to go through the Polish grammar with her. As her parents never stopped speaking Polish to their children, I don't need to explain her the meaning of words. We can go through the grammar at the speed of a Shinkansen. I'm hoping to find more students like her in Wellington, where most of the descendants of those Polish orphans are still living.

If anyone of you are interested in their stories, here's is a link to the book, that apparently has been posted on-line: http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-PolFirs.html