George and Emilia in 1958A POLISH couple who settled in Trowbridge after the Second World War have returned to the country of their birth for the first time in nearly 60 years.

George Kenich, 75, and his wife Emilia, 69, of Frome Road, were invited to go to the Royal Palace in Warsaw for the launch of a new book exploring the experiences of the 1.7 million Polish people deported to Siberia during the war.

Mr Kenich said: "It was very emotional. Over 1,000 people who were exiled as children came from all around the world."

The book, Polish Schooling in War-Time Exile, was written to explore the experiences of children, many orphaned by the war and forced to leave their homes.

Mr Kenich met men he had not seen since just after the conflict and the couple met many people who were instrumental in helping and protecting deportee children.

He was just 10 when Russian soldiers knocked on his family's door at 3am on January 10, 1940.

His future wife was only four when her family were woken in the middle of the night and told to pack what they could.

Both families were loaded on to cattle trains and taken to Siberia.

Mr Kenich said: "You could see nothing except a forest, snow and sky. It is winter there for nine months of the year.

"We had been brought there not to start a new life but for a slow, hungry death. We saw terrible things.

I was just 10 years old when I saw the dead body of a woman holding a baby."

Mrs Kenich's mother died only a year after arriving in Siberia and she and her 17-year-old sister had to care for four other siblings.

The deportees stayed in Siberia until their government, then exiled in London, struck a deal with Russian leader Stalin that Polish men could join the army's fight against Hitler and their wives and children could also leave.

Mr Kenich and his future wife ended up in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where they remained until the end of the war, unable to see their fathers until hostilities were over.

In 1948 Mr Kenich came to England, to a transit camp at an airbase at Steeple Ashton.

About 100 families settled in the Trowbridge area and Mr and Mrs Kenich, who married within six months of meeting in this country, stayed in the town, where they raised their sons, Julian and Andrew.