Pahīatua’s Polish children: Kamila relives memories of her time in camp

Kamila Kozimor was one of more than 700 children brought to New Zealand in 1944. Photo / Leanne Warr

It’s just a 10-minute video but for Kamila Kozimor, there are a few familiar faces in the clip on the Polish children.

“There’s our doctor,” she says as she watches the video in the Pahīatua museum.

She points out another familiar face and muses that many of the children featured in the clip would be unrecognisable today.

Then again, it has been almost 80 years since Kamila, one of more than 700 children, got off a troop ship in Wellington to board a train bound for Pahīatua.

“It’s kind of nice to see it again,” she says.

Kamila was 14 when she came to New Zealand, along with her younger sister.

Her mother died in Russia and her father had joined the Polish army.

Like many others orphaned by the war still sweeping Europe at the time, Kamila and her sister were evacuated to Iran (which she calls Persia).

Then in 1943, New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser invited the children and their caregivers to come to New Zealand and live in the camp, which would later be dubbed “Little Poland”.

Most of the children, she says, had no parents accompanying them on the long journey.

When they arrived in Pahīatua, although they were a bit “bewildered”, they were welcomed.

“People were very kind,” Kamila says.

During her time at the camp, she would attend lessons, as well as doing chores such as washing the dishes or in the vege garden, and many of the children had gardens of their own to tend.

“It was all right,” she says. “We had fun that way.”

They still managed to keep some of their Polish traditions both within the camp and long after they left it.

After the end of World War II, some of the children opted to return to Poland, but Kamila chose to stay in New Zealand.

“My life is here now,” she says.

Kamila moved to Auckland, where she went to St Mary’s College before getting her first job in a shop, but didn’t stay very long.

She would eventually move to Wellington, where she began working for the Government Printing Office.

Now in her 90s, she was visiting Pahīatua for the first time since she left the camp, accompanied by her niece, and got to see some of the history of the camp courtesy of the museum.