My name’s Anna Krok, I come from Poland, from Bydgoszcz in Poland. My great uncle, he was kidnapped actually during the Second War. It was in Poland, he was 13 at the time and he was playing on the street and the German Army, the soldier came and he took him to the German Army. He wanted to escape and he tried to escape and I don’t know exactly the story how it was, but he managed to escape to the British Army. And he landed here, worked for the army and he support the British Army. He met his wife and he stayed here. So the family lost contact with him for many years, but he was one of 13 children, they were very worried about him. And then both sides were trying to find each other, so through the charities they finally found each other and the contact was slow progressing.
He lives in Oldham, New Manchester, he’s got his family here. We keep in touch so the relationship between the families became much closer than before and then he came with his wife a couple of times to Poland, he wanted to see his original place where he was living.
My story starts when I was 10, my sister took me for the holidays to England for the first time and I love it, and I came here to visit our great uncle in Oldham, where they are living it’s a really beautiful place and that was for, I think, a month. And after another couple of years I received a scholarship to go to Finland, but everything was in English, so I wanted to come to England to visit my uncle and basically learn English. I went to his house with my friends and we spent lovely holidays there. We learnt English because we were surrounded with English people, with lovely, English culture. We met lots of different people, we started to work and then after a year I decided to come back to finish my studies, integrated education for early years children. I finished that and I came back again to England.
London has more opportunities. Through an agency I’ve tried to look for different jobs and first I landed in a nursery for a couple of months and then I received a phone call that a lady said, ‘It’s a special school, but don’t be scared, everything is so fine, don’t be scared, come and have a look.’ So I went there, I was petrified. After my first day I was crying and crying and I didn’t want to come back, but then someone talked to me and said, ‘You just need to calm down, go for one week and then you can decide.’ And I stayed there until today, I’m still working there and I love it, I absolutely love it!
