Witness

Memory is Our Homeland: European refugees in Africa

A filmmaker retraces the childhood odyssey of his Polish grandmother who became a refugee in Africa during World War II.

Jonathan Durand retraces his grandmother’s World War II journey from Poland to Africa.

He discovers the astonishing story of how thousands of Polish deportees, mostly women and children, ended up migrating from labour prisons in Siberia through Iran and India to refugee camps in Africa.

Many Poles did not want to return to their homeland, as the lands they were from had been annexed by the Soviet Union. To this day, they live scattered across the world.

This is their remarkable story of displacement and resilience which has been forgotten by the history books but kept alive as family myth.