Today most of the remaining former refugees are in their 80s and 90s.

But last weekend many of them met in Wellington and in Pahiatua with their Kiwi children and grandchildren; friends, Polish officials and supporters to mark the 75th anniversary of their arrival.

The daughter of two of the refugees, Stan and Zofia Januszkiewicz, Krysia Januszkiewicz Reid, is chair of the organising committee for the 75th-anniversary commemorations.

Friday started with a trip to the old camp, which is now a farm, followed by a lunch, social gatherings and mass for the original Polish Pahiatua children and their families.

Krysia was lost for words when she described how special the weekend was for her family and others like it.

"We heard stories all the time, my grandfather found my uncle and my father after the war through the Red Cross and he lived with us, so it is very real."

"To me, it just sort of reminds me that I won't have my parents here forever."

"It just reminds us of how easy we have things here, and what they have gone through as well."

She says all members of the committee have parents who were part of the original Pahiatua children.

Krysia says the weekend is for her parents, to honour what they have been through.

Thanks to the efforts of New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser, his wife Janet Fraser and Countess Maria Wodzicka, wife of the Polish Consul in New Zealand, the 733 children and their 102 caregivers were brought from Iran, to which they'd been evacuated, to New Zealand.

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• stuff.co.nzt
• thespinoff.co.nz
• Image: stuff.co.nz

Today their odyssey was remembered on Wellington's waterfront as surviving Polish refugee children gathered for a wreath-laying with Polish foreign affairs minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who is visiting to mark the 40th anniversary of New Zealand-Poland diplomatic relations.

‘‘Today we are very grateful to the people of New Zealand who gave refuge to our children when they needed it - squeezed between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia they were the victims and orphans of the gulag,'' the minister said.

Among those attending were Eric and Halina Lepionka - two of the 733 child refugees who escaped war torn Europe and the Siberian forced labour camps where their parents were put to work by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Eric was eight when he arrived at the Pahiatua Children's Camp in 1944.

Halina was just a baby so it wasn't until years later that they met at the Empress Ballroom in Ghuznee St and later cemented their relationship at Sunday mass in Newtown's Polish church.

Mr Lepionka said the horrors and highlights of the journey - which took them from Siberia to modern day Iran, then to refuge in rural New Zealand - are in the back of his mind every day.

He remembered the minus 40 degrees Celsius Siberian winters.

‘‘When you slept you didn't lean against the wall because you'd stick to it... it's something that you only see in films,'' the 76-year-old retired builder said.

By train, cart and foot the 240,000 first transport of Polish deportees from Stalin's Siberian labour camps, both adults and children, painstakingly made their way to British-controlled Persia.

Mr Lepionka was then aged six, his mother died in Uzbekistan en route and his father returned to Poland after contracting typhoid - he never saw him again.

Up to 2 million Poles had been deported to the labour camps and some estimates put the survival rate at just 20 per cent. Continue reading

Sources

• Manawatu Standard
• Image: NZ History Online