Abstract:
In 1944, an invited group of 733 Polish children and 105 Polish adults journeyed to New Zealand as a safe haven in wartime. This thesis explores the educational experiences of these Polish people in times of political occupation of their homeland, including their exile and stories of resilience and recovery. This study is historically situated across several geo-political landscapes, including life in Poland, deportation to Soviet labour camps, evacuation to Persia and resettlement in New Zealand. The study focuses on circumstances of migration, nationhood and identity as influences on the nature of the children’s education. A significant feature is the agency displayed by this group of Polish people as they struggled to determine their own education across different contexts. The thesis shows the varied education the children experienced, including communist schools in Russia and orphanage-schools in Persia. A focus of this thesis is the Polish school set up at a New Zealand army camp at Pahiatua in the Manawatu. The thesis draws on autobiographical, oral, archival and other historical evidence to examine educational experiences of the Pahiatua Polish people. A framework of migrational factors supports understanding of the implications of voluntary and involuntary population movement over time. Historical research methodologies help make sense of the complexity of education as part of the life story during times of upheaval and relocation. The implications of these processes for understanding national identity and nationhood are examined with reference to the work of French philosopher, Ernest Renan. The study found that education was a site of struggle for the assertion and expression of Polish identity through language, culture, history and religion. Even when repressed by communism, the Polish children exhibited solidarity and a sense of national pride and sacrifice, sustaining their scattered communities with hopes for the national future. Despite being physically stateless at times, they were strongly bound by these ties. Because the school at Pahiatua began as a temporary arrangement for the Polish children as guests of the New Zealand government, the Poles essentially ran the school for the purposes of educating their children as Polish citizens of the future, who would return to Poland after the war as future leaders and rebuilders of a free, western, capitalist nation.