Weekly Review No. 169 - New Zealand Soldiers and Polish Children

Name: Weekly Review No. 169 - New Zealand Soldiers and Polish Children
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1944-01-01
Duration: 8 min

1944 0h 8m Released

Documentary

This 1944 newsreel documents arrivals at a Wellington wharf from the Middle East: New Zealand soldiers and Polish children. For the refugees it was the conclusion of an epic wartime survival tale: an exodus from Poland via Siberian labour camps, to being greeted by Prime Minister Peter Fraser in NZ. The Poles then take the train past waving crowds to their new home: a camp in Pahīatua. Twenty years later the children were revisited in Kathleen O’Brien’s classic 1966 documentary The Story of Seven-Hundred Polish Children.