Some
of the Poles who settled in West Yorkshire after World
War Two, and their children, feel this is a story
that should be more widely known.
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One
survivor later made Huddersfield her home. She's been telling
BBC Radio Leeds' reporter Tim Daley what happened to her and
her family when she was just nine years old: "I
don't remember exactly what time but I'm sure it was very,
very early morning or night that Russian soldiers came banging
at the door and they said, 'It's time to pack your things,
whatever you can, in a very short time,' and they put us on
a sledge because it was winter and it was very, very frosty
outside, and they took us to the nearest station and they
packed our whole settlement village into one cattle truck
and we started our journey. to Russia. I don't know how long
it was - probably a few weeks or even longer.
"There
were a few things my mother would have liked to have packed
but the soldier said, 'No, it will be of no use there.' Some
soldiers were quite human but some weren't. They were pushing
and so on. I think we just knew that we shouldn't be coming
back, so we just knelt down, said a prayer."
Asked
why she thinks the Russians acted as they did, she replies:
"Yes. They wanted the Polish people living there to be
taken to Siberia and work until they die. They took us into
a forest, the parents had been cutting trees down and the
children had to go to school - Russian, of course. There was
no hospital, no doctors, nothing."
Has
it affected her life? "Of course, I don't know what I
would have been if we'd stayed there. My education, my work,
my family even."