The heroes and heroines in this book are Polish orphans now living in New Zealand, who in their own words tell of childhoods filled with ordeal and horror, dur ing a unique, but stilllargely unpublicised episode ofPolish history in World War II, and of their subsequent life in a foreign land on the other si de of the world. These children and their families were brutally evicted from their homes in Poland by the Russian secret police (the NKVD) and exiled to sl ave labour in Siberia and other parts of Soviet Russia in the years 1940-1941.