Give Us This Day

Give Us This Day: A Memoir of Family and Exile (2014) is a memoir by Helena Wisniewska Brow. She explores the story of her own father and family. Stefan Wisniewski was one of the 732 Polish child survivors of World War II who were deported to New Zealand by the Soviets. Seventy years later, his daughter explores what happened to her family. The writing style is non-linear and a bit meandering, jumping between the author’s own memories of her childhood and young adulthood to the contemporary narratives of her family, her father’s memories of his childhood as a Polish deportee in World War II, and a broader historical narrative of that war, deprivation, and loss endured by the Polish survivors of labor camps.

The prologue begins with the description of a photograph of fourteen-year-old Stefan Wisniewska and his sister Hela standing over their mother’s dusty Tehran grave. It is a sobering image, and then the narrative jumps back in time to show how they arrived at that point. Poland of the early twentieth century was constantly drawing and redrawing its borders, agitated by two World Wars. Many of Stefan’s childhood memories are faded. He grew up poor, but so did many Poles, so poverty was not remarkable. His mother, Stefania, was fifteen years younger than his father; a woman from a family with some social standing and who bore eleven children, most of whom were deported to Siberia with her.

In the present day, and recent past, Brow recounts her travels and her shadowy memories of mysterious Polish family members. She is fascinated with her family history, in discovering who they are, and what happened to them. With her father’s siblings getting older or dead, and her own father in his 80s, the reader gets the feeling that Brow is running against time to solve the mysteries. Part of unraveling the past is traveling there, and she goes back to Poland multiple times with family members to trace her roots.



The wheel of fortune begins to turn against the family in 1939, when Stefan is ten. Stefan’s two eldest brothers are conscripted into the Polish army after the Germans invade, and refugees begin streaming past their house. When the Soviets take over, school lessons become propaganda, and Poland becomes a police state, with everyone watching everyone else. When Stefan is twelve, his own family is deported. Four soldiers pull everyone from their beds, search the house, and tell them to take only what they can carry. Stefania and eight of her children are herded onto a train car meant to transport livestock, separated from her husband and one of her sons (who narrowly escape being executed by the Germans). Rations are few and by the time the trains arrive in Siberia, the passengers are weak, dirty, and starving. Although the Wisniewski family is lucky enough to have a short detention at the prison camp before heading south, that winter, one of the harshest on record, kills a quarter of all the Poles deported from Eastern Poland by the end of 1941.

The family is freed. They pool their meager resources with another group of deportees and get passage on a train headed south. Unfortunately, when they arrive in Uzbekistan, they realize that conditions there are as dire as they would have been in Siberia, especially with such a huge, unsupportable influx of refugees. Hela and Roman both find work on local farms and help feed the family with cabbage and corn. This ends when the family relocates to another camp that promised to be better but fell through. The family is on the brink of starvation, people are dying of typhus around them, and the two eldest children, Roman and Regina, enlist in the Polish army, which promises food and a roof over their heads. Fifteen-year-old Czesiek and then thirteen-year-old Stefan follow in their footsteps, enlisting in a cadet force. This allows the older children to take some pressure off their mother, sending food rations to keep the rest of the family from starving.
The cadet force relocates south to Persia, where they are cleaned up and fed a regular diet. Eventually, their mother and younger siblings join them in the south. Not long afterward, Roman and Regina are sent to the front in Italy, Stefan is asked to leave the cadets for misbehavior, and Stefania dies of a terminal illness.

At fifteen, Stefan is relocated to New Zealand with 731 other Polish children, including Hela and his two youngest sisters. Many thought the measure only temporary, and a stroke of luck. However, when the war ends the next year, Poland is in ruins, and 20 percent of the original population is dead from the fighting, death camps, or from starvation. They manage to contact their father and brother, who had been able to return home to extended family when they escaped execution. Slowly, the exiled children are absorbed into New Zealand communities, since going home is unfeasible. Hela takes over as the caregiver for her younger siblings, keeping track of them and making all their clothes. When the camp closes, she ensures that her youngest sisters are sent to a Catholic school, until she can marry and give them a home. The exiled children settle in New Zealand, marry, and build their lives there.



The memoir won the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing. It contains an Authors Note on place names, personal names, and pronunciation. The book also contains numerous photographs (both black-and-white and color), facsimiles of documents, and maps.