POLISH CHILDREN

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21556, 19 January 1940, Page 5

POLISH CHILDREN

SCHOOL MAY BE STARTED IN DEV3NSHIRE (Special—By Air Mall) LONDON. December 23. Madame Olga Malkowsha, founder and chief of the Polish Girl Guide movement, may start a school for Polish children in Devonshire. Mme. Malkowska, who escaped to England after leading her pupils to safety in Rumania, is hoping for the use of a house in Devonshire, in which she will start her school. Negotiations for use of the house which may be on loan, are now proceeding. She already has in her charge five Polish children who are being cared for in Oxford until the opening of the school. She is working with the Polish Relief Fund, and spends her time travelling around the country assisting Poles with comforts and money. The rest of the children for her school are now on their way from Rumania. Lithuania and Hungary. They are being chosen by voluntary helpers in those countries, who went out after the Polish campaign. A child chosen need not necessarily be an orphan, but only the very destitute cases are being sent to Mme. Malkowska in England. Two of the children now under her care—they who will attend the school later on—are aged six and four. Their mother was left alone with them 75 miles from the Lithuanian frontier, where she had walked with the children. She met her husband, also a refugee, quite by chance in a street in Riga. Mme. Malkowska found the family in one room in London, practically destitute, the mother in a state of nervous collapse, the children more or less starving.