Untold Stories: Book’s link to Pahīatua

The team behind Untold Stories were at Pahīatua Museum to launch their book on the stories of six families who were part of the displaced persons staying at Pahīatua Camp in the late 1940s. From left: Dr Tania Kopytko, Mary Zambazos, Susie Tsaclis, Mychelle Mihailof and Bruno Petrenas.

There are stories that might have never been told if it wasn’t for the efforts of a group of writers.

These are the stories of their parents, people who left war-torn Europe to settle in New Zealand as skilled labour by way of the camp in Pahīatua where just a few years earlier hundreds of Polish children and their adult caregivers had stayed.

Dr Tania Kopytko, Mary Zambazos, Mychelle Mihailof, Susie Tsaclis and Bruno Petrenas all knew each other, with a parent or parents who had come from Central, Eastern or Southern Europe post World War II.

“It’s always been in the back of our minds, where our parent or parents had come from,” Mihailof said.

But apart from hearing a few stories, their parents’ history was something they had never delved into.

“It’s only as you get older, I think, that you become more interested in who you are and your place.”

Mihailof said Tania had been asked to write her father’s story, but felt it wasn’t just about his story, as it was about her friends as well.

“I think what we’ve done is we’ve thrown a pebble into a pool and just opened up,” she says.

“This is what we hope - that we’ve allowed people to see that there’s a way to find information if you don’t know and you shouldn’t be afraid to find out about that, even if your parents never spoke about it.”

There were 5000 migrants, known as displaced persons, who came to New Zealand between 1949 and 1952 at a period of time when New Zealand’s policy was around the need for migrant workers.

“These people came from very traumatic backgrounds,” Mihailof said.

Most chose to ignore their past and in the case of her father, he refused to even use his native language.

But many of them may have also dealt with post-traumatic stress or survivor’s guilt.

“The journeys, the thread of luck that’s been woven through all of these stories,” Mihailof observed. “Why them? Why did they not get killed along the way like their friends did?”

In the 1950s, there was no such thing as therapy or counselling.

Many of the new citizens stayed for a few short weeks at the Pahīatua camp, before being given a job and told to just get on with things.

“There were some sad stories of not making it.

“It wasn’t rosy for a lot of families.”

Mihailof said the people were brought to New Zealand for a reason.

“They were here to fulfil that need to have people in the workforce. And these people contributed greatly to our society.”

One of the more famous of those migrants was Bogdan Kominowski, also known as Lee Grant, a singer in the 1960s, who went on to become an actor in England.

Untold Stories also had a successful exhibition in Palmerston North in July and it’s hoped they will be able to continue into the next stage next year both in Palmerston North and in Pahīatua.