Zbyszek Poplawski is a special person: very kind and warm. Throughout his adult life he worked as a surgeon in New Zealand, where he ended up as one of 733 “Pahiatua children” – Polish orphans rescued from Sybir, who were invited by that country’s government in 1944 and taken into care. Zbyszek is also a descendant of the distinguished Zieleniewski family, whose patriarch, Kazimierz, was exiled to Siberia after the January Uprising (1863), and whose home in Tomsk, Siberia, was a kind of centre of Polish culture at the turn of the 20th century. In the film, Zbyszek Poplawski talks about his childhood in Kazakhstan …

The interview was conducted as part of the project “Bolesław Augustis and Sybiracy in New Zealand. Query and digitisation of selected archives’ was co-financed by the National Institute of Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad ‘Polonica’ and the budget of the City of Białystok.

The project lasted from 1 June to 16 November 2023. It was implemented by the Widok Cultural Education Association, in partnership with the Sybir Memorial Museum and Polish organisations in New Zealand.