ASPJ & Kresy Siberia – The Forgotten Deportees – Polish Exiles in Siberia 20110227
Channel: Kresy-Siberia
Date: 2016-06-19

Polish Exiles in Siberia - a Panel Discussion (27 February 2011, Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne, Australia).
Over one hundred members of the Jewish and Polish communities attended a panel evening on "The Forgotten Deportees - Polish Exiles in Siberia" organised by the Australian Society of Polish Jews and Their Descendants, in conjunction with Kresy Siberia Australia (www.kresy-siberia.org).

Chaired by Prof. Stephen Wheatcroft, the panel comprised Krystyna Kinst (Descendant), Zosia Skarbek (Survivor and President of the Victorian Sybirak Association) and Stefan Wisniowski (Descendant and Kresy-Siberia Foundation President).

The evening also featured special guest, Daniel Gromann, Consul General of the Republic of Poland and a screening of the documentary "A Forgotten Odyssey" by Jagna Wright and Aneta Naszynska, introduced by Louise Blazejowska (Descendant and Kresy-Siberia Director).

[originally posted on Vimeo by Lena Fiszman].

About the participants:

Moderator
Professor Stephen Wheatcroft.
Stephen Wheatcroft took his first degree in Economics and Russian Studies at Keele University, and his PhD in Soviet Economic History at Birmingham University. He has spent some considerable time working and researching in the Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian State and Party Archives and at the Moscow Institute of National Economics (Plekhanov Institute), the Moscow State University and the Institute of History of the Russian and Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Stephen has published widely on Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history and has recently coauthored a major history of the Soviet Famine of 1931-3. He also has a research interest in famine and food supply problems in modern world history, the impact of media on history, and in recent developments in Russian and Ukrainian society. He is one of the main editors of the major Russian publication of archival
materials. Stephen teaches at the University of Melbourne, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.

The Panelists

Krystyna Kinst.
Krystyna was born after the war, in Poland, to Siberian Deportees. At the start of the war, her parents fled Krakow to Lwow, from where, on 30 June 1940, they were transported to the Aldan Camps in Yakut USSR. The Aldan Camps were in some of the wildest country of Siberia. There, her parents felled trees in the taiga forests. The event that saved their lives – Germany’s invasion of
Russia and the subsequent amnesty granted Polish deportees – is the same event that, in Poland, led to the execution of many of their family members by the Nazis. Krystyna is a corporate communication consultant and writer.

Stefan Wisniowski,
President of Kresy-Siberia Foundation.
Stefan’s father’s family was forcibly deported by Soviet authorities on 10 February 1940 from his eastern Polish home in Brody to a labour camp in Archangel, in Soviet Russia.
After the USSR was attacked by Nazi Germany in 1941, the Wisniowski family were among the Polish captives who received a so-called “amnesty” and were later evacuated with the Polish Army to Persia, from where his father joined the cadet school in Palestine and then England. Stefan’s mother survived the war as a young girl
in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. His parents met in London after the war, and in 1957 emigrated to Canada, where Stefan was born.
Stefan founded the Kresy-Siberia Group in 2001. In 2008 he established the internationally operating Kresy-Siberia Foundation, with headquarters in Warsaw and incorporated affiliates in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US. This foundation’s aim is to ensure that the story of the deportations of Polish citizens to
Siberia and their suffering will be memorialised for future generations.

Zosia Skarbek,
President of the Siberyaks Assosciation of Victoria.
Zosia was born on 11 August 1936, in Kamien Koszyrski, Polesie Province, Poland. In April 1940, together with her mother, older brother, and maternal Aunt, she was deported to North Kazakhstan.
Her father, a school inspector and a member of infantry reserve, was captured by the Soviets and eventually executed in Katyn in April 1940. After spending almost two years in a work camp in Kazakhstan, Zosia and her remaining family made their way to Uzbekistan, in the southern Soviet Union, where the Polish army was being formed after the amnesty for Polish deportees
in 1942. Together with 120,000 other Polish citizens, they were allowed to depart the Soviet Union to Persia. After nine months in Persia, Zosia, her mother, aunt and brother were transported to Karachi in British-occupied India and then to the Polish refugee camp in Valivade (south of Bombay). In 1948 they were moved to a refugee camp in Uganda. In 1950, aboard the General Langfitt, together with over 700 other Sibiraks, they migrated to Western Australia. Zosia is a retired qualified psychologist.