Please see the following article about the Polish Foreign Minister's visit to New Zealand, where he paid homage to the Polish children who were given refuge in New Zealand after their evacuation from Siberia to Iran.

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Regards

Stefan Wisniowski

Sydney Australia

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Polish refugees remember harrowing journey

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REMEMBERING: Halina and Eric Lepionka at the wreath laying ceremony.

They grew up in the Siberian gulag, travelled thousands of miles in harrowing drudgery across Russia to Persia, then sailed half way around the world
to be greeted by thousands of smiling Kiwis.

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.

SOLEMN OCCASION: Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radoslaw Sikorski

commemorates the arrival of Polish children to New Zealand in 1944.

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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 were 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.‘‘There were streams of people walking with carts full of sick people. People were dying left, right and centre and there was no means of burying the?dead so they were just left on the side of the road,'' he said of the exodus.

The refugees finally made it to the Persian city of Isfahan - from there 105 caregivers were selected to accompany 733 children aboard the USS?General George M. Randall, which docked in Wellington on November 1, 1944 to a warm fanfare from the New Zealand public.?They were then taken to their new home - the Polish Children's Camp in Pahiatua.
Despite the initial language hurdles Mr Lepionka said ‘‘it was great playing with other New Zealand children and one of the biggest surprises was
playing rugby.''?Mr Lepionka said Polish players excelled at the game and went on to dominate the ranks of Wairarapa-Bush rugby in the post-war era.

The remarkable story is slowly gaining currency in Poland, where its telling was banned up until the fall of communism in 1989.

- ? Fairfax NZ News?MATT STEWART

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