The forgotten children of Poland's past

It's a story that no one wanted to hear after the war. But now one woman has uncovered the truth of the Polish families that survived the horrors of Stalin's labour camps.

A small, rather sedate, gathering in a house in west London. Seven elderly Polish émigrés - five women and two men - mostly in their seventies sit eyes fixed on a huge screen in Jagna Wright's living room. Wright, 49, though not of their generation is, like them, Polish but settled in Britain.

The screen flickers into life, grainy black-and-white images of war-torn Europe cut between interviews with elderly Poles, including some of those watching. Most were children when Poland was invaded by Germany on 1 September 1939, and 16 days later by the Soviet Union. By the end of an hour-long programme, the room is full of sighs and eyes are wet with tears.

Bitterness about Poland's fate, during the war and in the post-war carve-up of Europe, usually focuses on the 1940 Katyn massacre in which 22,000 Poles (the majority army officers) were secretly executed by the Soviets. When the massacre took place, Stalin was Hitler's ally, but when the atrocity was discovered, in 1943, Russia had switched sides. So crucial were the Soviets by then to the war effort that Britain and the Allies were prepared to swallow increasingly incredible Russian claims that the Germans were responsible for Katyn.

Katyn left an indelible mark on Poland, eventually symbolising its post-war abandonment to the Soviets. But according to Wright, the focus on the massacre masks a bigger human drama, and yet more injustice and neglect.

For after the Polish officers were rounded up, 1.7 million men, women and children from eastern Poland were forced by the Soviets into Russia. They were dumped in hell-holes in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Tens of thousands died of disease and hunger slaving for Uncle Joe. The seven elderly Poles gathered in Wright's living room are all survivors of a deportation Wright claims has been wrongfully relegated to a footnote in Western histories of the war.

Wright says the memories of survivors were repressed for the sake of post-war political expediency. For the end of conflict brought no victory to Poland, with the entire country was now under Soviet influence. In Britain, Polish émigrés' stories of Russian brutality only spoiled the post-war party. They were an embarrassment now that the brave Soviets were friends.

Some of the émigrés in Wright's living room see their neglect as part of a conspiracy stretching back to Katyn. It is perhaps more likely that they were cynically ignored at the time, and that as decades passed, their truth diluted and seemed to disappear. Whatever the reasons, Wright has spent the last five years recording survivors' stories and, with no previous experience, has made a documentary about this "disappearing" generation, screened last week at the ICA in London.

It is a moving piece of work. However belated, the survivors bear powerful witness to the times. Janina Kwiatkowska, now 70 and living in London, and one of Wright's small pre-preview audience, was 10 when she was deported with her sister, 9, mother and grandmother. They were herded into trains. Her grandmother died on the month-long journey. "The guards just pushed her out of the train door with two big hooks," she says. "She fell into a ditch and the train moved on." Three months later her mother died in Siberia. Janina and her sister struggled alone until the war ended. They trapped and ate rats and were saved from night blindness by the vitamin-rich livers of slaughtered dogs. "We were like two animals," she says, struggling, like other survivors, to connect the child with the adult she became. "I don't know how we survived, really."

Aniela Nowak, 70, a nun now living in Brighton, was 10 when she was exiled. "People did not have proper nutrition," she says. "It was cold and many, many people were dying in the camp." Her 17-year-old brother, forced to work in the forests, died of exhaustion. Her mother walked for miles through snow to recover his body. She finally found him lying in a Russian hospital. "Mother said he was naked, and that his tears were frozen on his body," says Nowak, crying. "With my [other] brother she travelled all night, and probably day, to bring the body home. And then my father had to dig the grave..."

Everyone remembers the cold. When frost bite attacked the feet of Dorota Leviner, now 74 but deported at 14, gangrene set in. Her mother saved her life by amputating three of her toes with a pair of manicure scissors.

In 1941, Russia's switch of allegiance led to an "amnesty" for deported Poles. But the agony did not end. Tens of thousands of men, women and children tried to travel south to the headquarters of a new army the Allies asked the Poles to create. But Russia was reluctant to lose its slave labourers. The few Poles who were released still had to find their own way.

The tragedy of some is beyond belief. Janina Jurkiewicz, 70, now living in Poland, who also 10 when she was deported. When she, her mother and two brothers set out for the south, their train broke down in the middle of the night. The driver told them it was likely they would be stuck for hours in temperatures of -40C degrees. She can still see her mother and others trekking off towards the lights of a nearby village in the hope of getting food. "We could see them walking up to the waist in snow," she says. "And then the train suddenly started. [There was] terrible despair. The children cried and I realised that that might be the last time I saw my mother. And that is what happened - I never saw her again."

She and her two little brothers continued south towards further starvation and epidemics of typhoid, dysentery and malaria. Janina's two brothers developed fevers and were admitted to hospital. "After three days the younger one, Zbyszek, died," she says. "He was only two and a half. I spent the whole night with him knowing he was no longer alive." He was taken away. She was worried he had been buried in the hospital cemetery where hungry dogs were digging up the dead. Her other brother Jurek, 8, died a few days later. Delirious, he kept calling for mummy. This time she had to bury the body.

Children like Janina struggled on and survived. The luckiest, though skeletal by now, left with the Polish forces for Iran. The majority of Poles laboured in the Soviet Union for the rest of the war. After the war, Poles who found themselves abroad often felt they had no home to go to. More than 100,000 settled in Britain.

Sitting in Wright's living room, Anna Moszczynska, 86, remembers leaving on the last convoy for Iran. "It was terrible to see the sea of ragged beggars which was not allowed to leave." Her mother was among them, and though her mother survived the war, she died, worn out, in 1946.

Moszczynska says that in Iran, Polish army commanders encouraged everyone to write down their experiences so that one day justice could be done. But an old Polish soldier claims in Wright's documentary that Polish servicemen were instructed by British officials to remain silent about their Russian ordeal. The ignorance about their past clearly hurts. Janina Kwiatkowska says a woman recently asked her where she spent the war. "I said I was in Siberia. And she said 'Weren't you lucky?'"

Stefan Waydenfeld, 74, a retired London GP, says that after 1945 British friends did not want to listen. He still bristles at the cartoons which depicted Poles as miserable warmongers and party poopers. As a teenager, even his own daughter, he says, did not want to hear, struggling, as she was, to become British. But 30 years ago he began to jot his memories down and recently published The Ice Road, the story of his deportation, to considerable acclaim.

He always suspected a third generation would be more interested. "It's history now," he says. "Even we [the survivors] feel it happened to someone else. But when I talk about it now my eyes still get moist."

Wright says the deportation was never mentioned in post-war Communist Poland. It was only when her ageing aunt told her about her own suffering in Russia that her obsession with the story began.

Now survivors are passing away, bitter at the lack of recognition, she says. Gaining their rightful place in the history books is all the justice they crave.