WANGANUI VISITOR HAD EXCITING EXPERIENCES IN WAR-TIME FRANCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27012, 22 February 1949, Page 2

WANGANUI VISITOR HAD EXCITING EXPERIENCES IN WAR-TIME FRANCE

NOTES FOR WOMEN

Studying commercial art and singing in Paris, nursing in war-time France, a taste of concentration camp life, and, finally, marriage to a Russian, a member of the resistance movement—any one of these would seem to be high adventure or romance to the average stay-at-home New Zealand woman, but Mrs Koreneff-Domogatzky, an attractive visitor from Wanganui has taken all these things in her stride, and has settled down in her home town ;with her husband and baby.

When war broke out Miss Sydney Duigan, as she then was, decided to give up all thought of continuing her studies, took up nursing, and, with a group of other enthusiastic young women, took a Red Cross diploma course. Normally, this course would have taken a year to complete, but the group finished it in a very short time and commenced Red Cross nursing in Calais. At that time war work was not compulsory, and Miss Duigan, the only British woman in the group, could have gone to England, had she so desired. The hospital in which she was nursing was badly bombed at one stage, and later, for devotion to duty, this New Zealander and other nurses received the Croix de Guerre.

An unenviable experience was a stay of several weeks in a concentration camp. “They did’nt take any notice of the fact that we were nurses,” Mrs Koreneff-Domogatzky told the Daily Times, “ but, as concentration camps go, this one was not so bad.” Almost all through the war Mrs Koreneff-Domogatzky was nursing in Calais, but later spent some time in the South of France, where she met her husband, who was in the French resistance movement there.