I have been trying to contact the Polish community in Blackburn, without success. I am a member of the Kresy-Siberia (UK) organisation which is a registered charity.

Our aims are to promote research, recognition and remembrance of the thousands of eastern Polish settlers brutally removed from their homes on the orders of Stalin during the early 1940s and deported to Siberia and beyond.

This is a particularly dark period in our Polish history, one which many younger Polish people will be unfamiliar with.

My dad, grandmother and uncle were in February 1940 taken from their homes in the middle of the night, put on cattle trucks and sent to a place called Altai Kraj to work in the forests there.

The three of them made it to freedom under “the amnesty” by Stalin, but she died with typhus in Teheran, and is buried there. Dad joined the PAF in Iraq, and came to England in 1942 and was in 306 Polish Squadron RAF.

His brother stayed with Anders Army, served in Palestine, North Africa and Monte Cassino. We are in need of volunteers to spread the word of Kresy-Siberia (UK), help raise funds, and interview the last few survivors, and also to help with the many other jobs to be included in our virtual museum in Warszawa.

If you can help, please log on to www.Kresy-Siberia.org or contact our director Eva Szegidewicz on 0161 445 6904. Email UK@Kresy-Siberia.org.

Ann Siburuth, Clayton-le-Moors.