Stefania Podsiadla

Stefania Podsiadla (nee Karas) was born in Chorostkow in 1924. The family had settled in a colony at Miłow with other pioneering families originally from Lubatowa, near Krosno, until their enforced deportation from Kresy in February 1940.

A teenaged Stefania and her family endured being orphaned in an extraordinary, enforced journey from their Kresy homeland to Siberia. Originally. The family was made up of five boys and five girls. Her older sister Aniela died in Siberia, two others died on the journey south to find the Polish army being formed in the USSR, and her mother Felicja died in a hospital in Pahlevi, Persia.

The family had crossed the Urals and Eurasia, reaching sanctuary across the Caspian Sea in Persia (Iran), and rehabilitation in India, and finally to more settled lives in several countries across the British Commonwealth. Her sister Kwirna became a nun in the UK, her brother Edward joined the priesthood in the USA and served in Tasmania, her brother Adam became a doctor in the USA. The remaining siblings (Paulina, Jan, Stefania, and Stanislawa) settled in the UK after the war.

Stefania spent the years 1942 to 1947 in a Polish refugee camp in India and worked at the Polish Consulate in Bombay. She then lived happily in Brighton, England for over sixty years. In 1948 she married Stanislaw Podsiadly (originally from Sandomierz), whom she had met in Browning’s Resettlement Camp in West Sussex, UK. They raised a family of four boys, and led peaceful, productive and contented lives.

Stanislaw died in 1988 and Stefania passed away in 2010, in Brighton, England.