Sophia's story of survival

A Polish orphan sent to Pahiatua in 1944 has written of her harrowing, yet inspiring journey. GRANT MILLER reports.

Houses on hilltops looked like colourful matchboxes to Polish orphan Sophia Turska as she stared at her new homeland from the deck of an American troop ship.

The sun shone on Wellington Harbour on October 31, 1944, when the plucky 16-year-old and other survivors of war-ravaged Europe caught their first glimpse of New Zealand.

Devastation was behind her and opportunity ahead.

"I had no idea what was going to happen," the now 82-year-old says at her Palmerston North home.

Sophia Turol (nee Turska) and her little brother Bob were two of hundreds of children who boarded a train for Palmerston North, then Pahiatua, where an orphanage was set up.

Initially educated in Polish at Pahiatua, she learned English and later became a nurse, married a Polish ex-soldier and had five children.

Now, Mrs Turol has written a book, Sophia's Challenging Journey, about the horrific events that tormented her family in Eastern Europe and how she came through it all.

Mrs Turol is one of the oldest survivors of the 733 Polish orphans and about 100 staff invited to New Zealand in 1944 by Prime Minister Peter Fraser.

She is old enough to have a vivid recollection of events leading up to that.

With eastern Poland under Soviet Union control at the start of World War II, Mrs Turol and members of her family and friends were sent to Siberia. She was 12 at the time.

"I had to be strong and believe that one day things would change and I would walk the grounds of freedom again," she writes in the preface.

She has never been back to Poland.

Just a third of the 1.5 million Poles deported to the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin's brutal regime survived, she says.

"I survived probably because I was not afraid to challenge ..."

Whether it was collecting blueberries in the Siberian forest amid bears or braving the forest to find her lost mother, the girl who had turmoil and responsibility foisted upon her would stand up to meet her circumstances.

Her father, part of the Polish underground resistance, was captured by the Germans and died at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. He was 47.

The fate of her mother is less clear.

She broke her leg when she was on her way out of Siberia to southern Russia, was whisked away in an ambulance and Mrs Turol never saw her again. She also lost three uncles in the war.

Mrs Turol recalls the morning Soviet soldiers ordered her family to leave their Polish property.

Her older brother Constantine asked if he could have breakfast first, a request that was allowed, and her mother offered the soldiers breakfast, but they declined.

The children said goodbye to their horses and dog, packed up their belongings and were taken to the nearest school.

They met relatives and other families in the community and were forced onto trains, but not told where they were going.

Mrs Turol remembers putting her hand in her cold pocket and pulling out a matchbox full of dirt.

"What is that, darling?" her mother asked.

"It is soil from our land."

They were then herded into cattle carriages headed for snowy Siberia.

It was several weeks before they could shower.

Some people died on the journey.

Facilities at their destination were basic.

The children were sent to school, where teachers preached the virtues of communism and said there was no God. Sick of this education, Mrs Turol and her younger brother Albin left school and worked instead, felling trees and stacking logs.

In her book, Mrs Turol recounts how Constantine, at another labour camp, was able to get an uncensored message to his family.

At the bottom of an innocuous note, he signed his name "Warm Up" (in Polish).

His family placed the letter by the fire, and a message written in onion juice was revealed: "We all work very hard felling trees every day, 12 hours a day. Food was just to survive. Many older men are getting sick and many have died but I am all right."

Constantine and other relatives were reunited with family after a friend of one of Mrs Turol's aunts formed a romantic liaison with a soldier, who evidently pulled some strings.

Germany turned against the Soviet Union in 1941, resulting in the release of Poles from Russian labour camps and Constantine joined the re-forming Polish army.

Plans were made by deportees to travel to Samarkand in southern Russia. Mrs Turol and Albin worked in a brick factory to raise money for the trip, which started on March 3, 1942.

However, their mother broke her leg on that journey and Polish soldiers intervened before the train could get to Samarkand because of an outbreak of typhoid there.

Mrs Turol and her two younger brothers were sent to a refugee camp in Persia. Remarkably, Mrs Turol recognised Constantine as a soldier guarding the camp.

At 14, she faced a tough choice. She and her younger brothers could either travel with relatives to Africa or go to an orphanage. Mrs Turol decided she didn't want to burden her relatives with more children.

Life improved. "On the children's faces you could see more smiles and their eyes began to sparkle with brightness," she says in her book.

Bob caught scarlet fever, then pneumonia and was read the last rites by a priest, but recovered.

A teacher asked girls aged 14 to 16 to write to soldiers to boost their morale and Mrs Turol began corresponding with the man who would become her future husband, Joseph Turol.

Albin, 14, became a Polish navy cadet.

In 1944, Mrs Turol, who had turned 16, travelled with Bob to Bombay on a British merchant ship. They then boarded the American troop ship General Randall.

Mrs Turol says it was a comfortable journey to New Zealand and the children were given a heart-warming welcome in both Wellington and Palmerston North.

They received flowers, sweets and icecream, she says. "It brought tears to our eyes."

The Polish Children's Camp in Pahiatua was previously an internment camp for foreigners, near the town's racecourse.

Initially, it was hoped the orphans would return to Poland, but the New Zealand Government decided they should be allowed to stay. "We couldn't go back," Mrs Turol says.

She continued to look after Bob, who was 10 years younger. "I suppose I was like a mother to him," she says.

"He didn't remember his mum."

In Pahiatua, Mrs Turol had a disturbing dream about Constantine. She dreamed Polish soldiers were marching, but her downcast brother was in civilian clothes.

The next day she received a telegram informing her Constantine, aged 21, had been killed in the war.

Mr Turol came to New Zealand after the war and Mrs Turol rejected his first marriage proposal, but accepted his second. They had five children, but later divorced.

She is grateful to the New Zealand Government and people who showed hospitality, kindness and generosity to the orphans.

Mrs Turol says the Siberian hardship taught her the power of being proactive. "You've got to do something to survive."

Her book ends with a call for social harmony.

"Be gentle, kind, do good in this world and give love and happiness to others."

- © Fairfax NZ News