Displacement and Discoveries: Cultural Trauma and Polish Child Refugees in Contemporary Australasian Fiction

Sa？etak This paper focuses primarily on the experiences of Polish child refugees in World War 2, some of whom were relocated to New Zealand. In 1944, the New Zealand government accepted 733 Polish refugee children who had survived deportation to the Soviet Union labour camps in Siberia before reaching Red Cross camps in Iran. For these Polish children, arrival in New Zealand, the southernmost colonial outpost of Britain, was a challenging and bewildering process. While many refugee narratives have been produced as a consequence of World War 2, few, if any, document the journeys undertaken by families who were evicted from their Polish homeland and deported to Russia, before being relocated to countries such as New Zealand. Displacement on such a scale underscores the depth of cultural trauma and its manifestations in the selected texts. This paper suggests that the mode of historical representation in the texts constructs a timely pathway for further exploration of transnational literature, signalling how texts can extend beyond national boundaries, and foreground interactions between cultures. The paper probes how children’s literature that depicts the experiences of Polish child refugees situates itself within a discourse of cultural trauma