This First Person article is from Agnieszka Matejko whose mother lived through the mass deportation of Polish people to Siberia during the Second World War. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
I used to be jealous of my friends’ mothers who hosted parties, baked cookies and chatted with us when we visited. My mother never baked a cookie in her life — she barely knew what they were — and mostly scurried away when my friends came over.
An accomplished historian in Poland, she’d come to Canada in 1970 as an unwilling emigrant dragged away from her homeland