Krystyna's Story (New Zealand Women's Lives)

Krystyna is brought up on a farm in eastern Poland - before the Second World War tears her life, her family and her country apart. Having survived forced deportation to the Soviet Union and several years in a Siberian labour camp, she becomes one of the 'Polish children' brought to New Zealand by the Fraser government. She eventually marries a New Zealander and has children: looking out at a very different world at the end of her life, she can never forget the horrors she knew in her youth.'Krystyna' is constructed from oral history: she is one or all of the women that author Halina Ogonowska-Coates interviewed - women who were among the 'Polish children', girls who grew up into New Zealand women but who always retained their memories of a Polish childhood and a European war.