‘They step onto seven acres of good New Zealand earth that for a time is by hospitality a small part of Poland,” intones the narrator of a 1944 New Zealand newsreel describing the arrival in Pahiatua, Manawatū, of more than 700 Polish child refugees.
“They can dream in peace for this is a home. This is the end of their journeying,” the English-accented voice says in what was part news and part propaganda that never quite explains why the children became refugees or from whom they had fled.
The origin story of the Pahiatua Polish children and thousands like them shipped to Africa, India and Mexico was kept deliberately vague during war time. They fled not from Adolf Hitler’s Nazis but from Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Eighty years after 733 Polish children and their 102 carers arrived in Pahiatua as what are often, not entirely correctly, called New Zealand’s first refugees, we know the story. The few remaining survivors and their many descendants will mark one of the most extraordinary and little-known odysseys of the war at commemorations in Pahiatua, Wellington and Auckland in early November.
It is a story of dislocation, death and desperation that sheds light on how we think today about refugees. New Zealanders welcomed the adorable Polish children, the boys with their shaved heads and shorts, the girls in pinafores and ribbons. Well-wishers lined the railway between Wellington and Pahiatua, handing ice creams, comics and gifts through the windows of the trains carrying the photogenic white, Christian kids.
The welcome was genuine, though Prime Minister Peter Fraser’s government worried about the reaction to Polish Catholics when Protestant sectarianism was strong. New Zealand authorities had already been cautious about accepting Jewish refugees from Europe.
Well-wishers lined the railway between Wellington and Pahiatua handing out ice creams, comics and gifts.
Between Hitler & Stalin
The Polish children – and the parents they were forced to leave behind – were victims of the secret alliance between Hitler and Stalin, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This agreement split Poland between them in September 1939 and each sent in their armies and secret police.
Mieczysław (Mike) Markowski, now 92, was nine when Soviet troops from the NKVD – a precursor of the KGB – burst into his home in Hanivka, near Sokal in what is now Ukraine. They swept him, his sister Stanisława (Stasia), 4, and their parents Polikarp and Helena into cattle cars and eventually to a prison camp in Arkhangelsk, Siberia. Markowski remembers the Russians offering to let his mother, who was Ukrainian, stay but she refused to be separated from her family.
“It all happened at night. They always came to your house at night and just told you to pick up whatever you could, put it on a sledge and took you to the train,” he recalls. “We went to Siberia … in the cattle trucks, everything was shut up. You didn’t see anything outside.”
As many as 1.7 million Poles – depending on which historian you consult – were shipped to icy work camps. Many died on the journey. More died in appalling conditions in Siberia. Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Tartars, Jews and others suffered similar exile, forced labour, starvation and dislocation.
“The Russians had a beautiful policy,” Markowski says of the Arkhangelsk camp. “They didn’t waste a bullet on shooting you – if you didn’t work, you starved.
“There wasn’t a fence or anything around it because there was nowhere to go. If you tried to escape you’d starve before you got anywhere, or get killed.”
Many more, including Markowski’s father and a baby sister born in the camp, did not survive Siberia. In 1941, Stalin, stunned by the shock German invasion of Russia, switched to join the Allies and agreed to release the surviving Poles in an “amnesty”, and allowed the formation of the Polish Free Army under General Władysław Anders.
“That was the luckiest day of our lives – when Hitler attacked Russia after two years,” Markowski says. “But my father was dead by then.”
Stalin’s cynical ‘amnesty’
Only an estimated 120,000 soldiers and about 38,000 civilians – almost 14,000 of them children – were evacuated before Stalin closed the door, around the same time rumours surfaced of the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest. Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the killings – nearly 22,000 died – but only in 1990 after decades of the Soviets blaming it on the Nazis.
Polish men in the gulags were drafted into the Polish Free Army and, with women and children, went on an odyssey by train and foot thousands of kilometres from Siberia to what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and eventually on to Iran. The Polish soldiers fought in the Middle East and theatres including Italy, where many took part in the capture of Monte Cassino under Anders and alongside New Zealand commander General Bernard Freyberg.
Markowski, Stasia and Helena, along with thousands of other Polish children and adults, were sent to pick cotton for the Soviet war effort.
“We left Siberia and went all the way to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. The Polish Free Army was there gathering people before they went to Persia [Iran]. Mother took us all the way down there. We had to walk and catch trains. And we finally got there.”
While his mother picked cotton, Markowski recalls looking after his little sister, foraging for food – trapping birds and even a tortoise to supplement their rations. “It was delicious. I brought it to my mother and she put it in a pot and we ripped it up. Delicious meat.”
Months later, the Polish Free Army was on the move again, sweeping soldiers, the Markowskis and thousands of other families across the Caspian Sea to northern Iran.
He remembers his mother leading the children on a three-day walk to the port of Krasnovodsk, now Turkmenbashi. The kids boarded a ship but Helena could not.
“Stalin had to have his last word, you know, because he said, ‘Oh, let the men out and the children but I’m keeping the women.’ So, she has to stay back in Uzbekistan to work on the cotton farm. That’s the last time I saw her. She was a bit sick. I think she probably died shortly afterwards,” he says, dabbing a finger at the corner of one eye.
It’s hard to imagine NZers in their thousands turning out to welcome [today’s] refugees with ice cream and flowers.
In Iran, the Polish contingent of lost kids and soldiers joined British troops who set up camps and tried to feed children Markowski describes as “more like skeletons”. He says hundreds died.
Iran became a kind of home for the children. Of nearly 38,000 Polish civilians evacuated from Russia to Iran, nearly 14,000 were minors. Mike and Stasia were sent to separate camps for boys and girls, eventually reunited two years later in a camp in Isfahan, central Iran, before the children embarked on even longer journeys.
Thousands of the Polish orphans were shipped, many forever, to corners of the British empire: Tanzania, Kenya, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), South Africa, Uganda, Palestine, Lebanon, India. A large contingent, more than 1400, ended up in Santa Rosa in central Mexico, many of them stopping temporarily in the same camps in California where Japanese Americans had been interned.
US President Franklin Roosevelt refused to let those children stay in the United States, fearing a backlash against their Catholicism. The fact they had been prisoners of Stalin and the Soviet Union was suppressed to avoid criticism of the US alliance with “Uncle Joe”. However, Roosevelt did deploy Liberty ships to help refugees including the Poles, and committed $3 million to help get them get to Mexico.
Similar pressures played out on Peter Fraser, New Zealand’s wartime premier. But his wife, Janet, had been moved by Polish child refugees whose ship anchored in Wellington on the way to Mexico. Her influence and lobbying by Countess Maria Wodzicka, wife of the Polish consul, led Fraser to agree to offer sanctuary.
Before their arrival, New Zealand took 1000 refugees from central Europe between 1933 and 1943. Some were Jews, with a preference for Czechs who were seen as industrious. With antisemitism and a bias towards Anglo-Saxons, the door had opened only a crack.
Welcome to New Zealand
Each of the Pahiatua children has an epic story of loss, trauma and fortitude. We know almost by heart stories of the Holocaust and the industrialised genocide and pitiless rounding up, transport and extermination of millions of European Jews, Roma and other minorities by the Nazis.
The Pahiatua Poles are a less familiar story of suffering and endurance. Mike Markowski’s story is vividly told and typical of many others he was with.
The welcome for the Polish children on a Liberty ship that also carried returning Kiwi servicemen was clearly genuine and Fraser and his wife are still revered in Poland. In 2022, Polish President Andrzej Duda awarded the couple posthumously the Virtus et Fraternitas medal which recognises those who helped Poles and Poland in its worst hours.
The 1944 news reel narrator said of the Polish kids, “They’ve kept their pride, but their traditions have been reduced to a will to live, a bravery, a simple gratitude for food and shelter.”
“On the train to Pahiatua it was glorious,” says Markowski. “New Zealanders welcomed us so well. You know, schools had holidays; they were there waving to us. It was terrific. To us, when we finished up in the camp, that was heaven. They looked after us pretty well.”
In 1944, there was little in the way of counselling or help with coping with trauma. “When you are that young and you go through that sort of thing you become sort of self-sufficient,” Markowski reflects. “You know how to look after yourself. You don’t sit and ask yourself, ‘Why did it happen to me?’ You try to figure out how to get out of it. That’s how we survived.”
In Pahiatua, housed in an army camp that had been used to intern Japanese, Germans, Italians and Samoans of German descent, the orphans found a ready-made home with mess kitchens, schools, a hospital and care from Catholic groups, nurses, the army and civilians.
The last children left the camp on April 15, 1949. As the children got older, some left for Catholic schools around the country, others to stay with New Zealand families. The Wellington Catholic diocese ran a hostel for Polish girls until 1958 and another for boys in Island Bay until 1952. Some children were adopted by local families. “We were treated as guests. It was terrific,” says Markowski.
Polish community expands
Some of the Pahiatua Poles married others and the group expanded the small existing Polish community in New Zealand, which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade estimates today numbers between 4000 and 5000, many descended from the Pahiatua kids. With a communist puppet government in Warsaw and parents lost in Stalin’s Russia, camps or the war, around 90% of the children settled permanently in New Zealand. They were joined by another 22 children, and later, 900 Polish war veterans and displaced people.
Yet immigration minister Walter Nash had to reassure the Protestant Orange Order he was not opening the door to Catholic immigration, saying, “There was no intention on the part of the government to bring any large number of Poles into the country, and that the two small batches who landed … were all close relatives of children in the Polish camp.”
Markowski emerged from Pahiatua to St Augustine’s College in Whanganui. He became a star rugby player and after school, moved to Wellington and became a tram conductor and then bus driver. He met Margaret Moriarty, an Australian working in Wellington as a ticket seller, and they married in 1961. Their life became farming – he was a sharemilker, later a shepherd – in Manawatū, the Volcanic Plateau and Tairāwhiti/Gisborne. They had 10 children – the family, he says, is his greatest achievement. Stasia married a Kiwi and had two children. She lived in Auckland, dying at age 77 in 2013.
A powerful sense of belonging runs through the Pahiatua kids and the Polish community and they remained connected.
“There was a big mob of us from Pahiatua camp. We had balls and New Year’s Eve and that. We used to hire big halls and have dances, weddings and everything.”
They became self-sufficient, hard-working, loyal citizens … and together with their families, they say thank you.
Today, Markowski lives in Queensland, near some of his children. He’ll be here for the Pahiatua celebrations on November 1, including the re-enactment of the train ride. He retains a dashing moustache, now grey, curled to points at the tips. “Well, you know why I always wear it? Because, when I used to travel around New Zealand and meet my friends, there might be five or six years between visits. So the face has changed but the moustache never changed.”
It is interesting to consider what the story of the Pahiatua kids can tell us about our modern attitude to refugees. It’s hard to imagine New Zealanders in their thousands turning out to welcome Afghan, Colombian, Iraqi, Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Rwandan, or Palestinian refugees with ice cream and flowers at the airport.
In 1944, the Pahiatua Polish kids were symbolic of an epic struggle against totalitarianism – even if we were on the same side as the Soviets – and a focus of compassion as lost children. Maybe we would turn out today to welcome children, especially orphans. How we treat refugees, whether we expect gratitude or it is just our duty, is an ongoing discussion.
Asked about his view of contemporary refugees, Markowski’s response, understandably, emphasised his experience– acceptance but the need to fit in. “I believe when you come to the country, you look after this country.”
A plaque at the Wellington docks commemorating the 60th anniversary is as poignant as the 1944 newsreel, concluding of the Polish children of Pahiatua: “They became self-sufficient, hard-working, loyal citizens … and together with their families, they say thank you to the New Zealand government, New Zealand Army, Catholic Church, caregivers, teachers and all who extended a helping hand.”
Pahiatua Polish children and Polish Army League
More information:
New Zealand’s First Refugees: Pahiatua’s Polish Children, Polish Children’s Reunion Committee, 2004 ISBN 0-476-00739-9
Polish History New Zealand by Barbara Scrivens https://polishhistorynewzealand.org/
Polish Association in New Zealand https://www.polishcommunity.org.nz/
Silenced Refugees, an historical blog on Polish refugees worldwide. https://silencedrefugees.com/
Te Manawa museum and Manawatu Heritage websites.