Interview with Zofia Wolanska in which she recounts wartime conditions in Warsaw during World War II and her role in the resistance movement.

Interviewer: Daniela Kautsky. Project: Lives of Older Women of Non-English Speaking Background and their Adaption to and Contribution to Life in South Australia. Recorded on 4 July, 1 and 29 November and 14 December 1988.

Zofia Wolanska was born in Bolechow, Poland just before the First World War. Her father, an engineer, was murdured when Zofia was 12. She completed her secondary education at boarding school and, unable now to afford studying medicine, went to Warsaw to train first as a nurse and then a social worker. She describes her courtship and marriage to an airforce pilot during this period and the birth of her son in 1938.

At the outbreak of war Zofia was ordered to join the airforce as a nurse. She and her husband were separated for seven years. During the war Mrs Wolanska was taken prisoner by the Soviets; was placed in charge of an immunisation centre for civilians; arranged for her son's escape from the Soviet occupied area; and, while working as a social worker at a health centre near Warsaw, assisted the local resistance to the Germans and was wounded during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. In the last year of the war Mrs Wolanska stayed with her sister in the mountains and assisted the local partisans.

In 1946 she fled Poland and was reunited with her husband. They stayed in England for two years and then came to Australia in 1951 via a stay in Pakistan where her husband worked for that country's airforce. Mrs Wolanska's qualifications were not recognised in South Australia so she retrained as a ledger machinist and worked for 20 years as manager of accounts with the Onkaparinga Woollen Company. The interview concludes with Mrs Wolanska speaking about her son's upbringing, her involvement with the Polish community and with voluntary work.