Day after day, month after crushing month, Wanda Sztramko hauled herself out of bed before the sun came up. There was no hot water to wash with and a healthy, satisfying breakfast was a barely remembered dream.
Once outside in the freezing morning air above the Arctic Circle, Sztramko formed up with her fellow prisoners and started the tiring walk to her work site 10 kilometres away.
Five-hundred kilometres north of Moscow, along with hundreds of fellow Poles, she was a prisoner in the vast archipelago of labour camps that dotted Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's police state.
Her crime? She was Polish and the Soviets happened to need people to work as slave labour in their vast war machine. The Soviets had invaded Poland three weeks after Nazi Germany started the Second World War in September, 1939.
Germany and the Soviet Union lost no time in exploiting Poland's resources and persecuting its citizens.
Sztramko and her fellow prisoners, called zeks, lived a life of hell on earth. The weather was harsh, the work was backbreaking, the rations barely kept body and soul together. The isolation was complete: There were no towns nearby, just hundreds and hundreds of miles of virgin forest.
Once she arrived at the work site - in winter they had to walk through waist-high snow - Sztramko and the other women cut the branches off trees that were felled by the men. They only stopped when the sun went down.
Back in the barracks, conditions were crowded and there was little privacy. Lice flourished in unwashed bedding and people got sick very easily. Many of them died but there were always more zeks to replace them. Decades later, Sztramko spoke of her harrowing ordeal, which lasted 21/2 years. "We had no days off and worked from 6 in the morning until 7 at night. The only food we received was a kilo of bread which was to last us for a whole week."
Wanda Teresa Sztramko, née Komik, was born on July 12, 1918, in Stolin, then in the eastern part of Poland but now part of Belarus. Her father was a forestry engineer for the local landowner and things were comfortable for the family. At 4 a.m. on Sept. 17, 1939, the family was awakened by a violent pounding on their front door. Outside was a Soviet soldier. "He told the family that they had 15 minutes to get their belongings together because they were being removed from their homes," her son Les reports. They were herded into cattle cars. Their destination? The Soviet Union and a dreaded labour camp. Finally, Sztramko and her fellow Poles were released after Germany attacked her former ally in 1941. The guards simply opened the gates and told the prisoners to leave.
Poland was still occupied and German panzer forces were racing eastward across the Soviet Union. Wanda and some others decided to go south. Over the following months, she spent time in refugee camps in Iran and Iraq before ending up in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia. By the end of 1943, she was in Britain and a new life beckoned. Accepted into the Royal Air Force's Women's Auxiliary as a fabric worker, she sewed parachutes and worked on aircraft wings. Her social life was intense, but no one seriously interested her until she met a dashing young Polish fighter pilot named Karl Sztramko. By October, 1940, Karl was with a Polish Spitfire squadron of the RAF. He was credited with shooting down four-and-a-half enemy aircraft and was awarded the British Distinguished Flying Medal as well as Poland's highest decoration, the Vertuti Militari. The couple married in March, 1947.
After the war ended, the RAF offered its personnel vocational courses and Sztramko elected to take dressmaking. Although her parents had returned to Poland, she decided to strike out for a new country and chose Canada. More specifically, Hamilton, Ont., because she had read a book on Lady Hamilton, the mistress of Admiral Lord Nelson of the Royal Navy, and liked the name. Sztramko raised her two sons before she decided to put her dressmaking skills to good use. In 1956, she got a job with Raphael-Mack, an exclusive women's shop, and eventually rose to lead seamstress. A perfectionist, she stayed with the same shop 33 years, retiring in 1989. As her reputation grew among the ladies of Hamilton, many asked specifically for her. "Some ladies would call and ask if I was working on that day and if I was working they would come and buy. If I wasn't working on that day, then they wouldn't come and would wait until I was working."
Known for her generosity and iron will - if something had to be done she got on with it - Sztramko loved to cook and doted on her family. That's what made her special, according to her son, Les. "She had love, patience, wisdom. She always put her children's needs and those of everyone else before herself."
As a refugee, Sztramko was "eternally grateful" to Canada for accepting her and her husband. She became a citizen on July 15, 1955.
"She absolutely loved Canada. Every year on Canada Day she put a flag on the front window of her house and also a larger flag at the entrance, " her son said.
After Karl died in 1995, Sztramko moved to Ottawa's Perley Rideau Veterans' Health Centre. She never tired of telling people. "I am very happy here and the staff is wonderful, the care is excellent and the food is perfect."
She kept up her sewing skills, using her machine to make alterations for the other residents free of charge.
Sztramko, who died of natural causes on March 27 in Ottawa, never held a grudge against the Russians for uprooting her and her family, her son said. She leaves her sons Les and Richard, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.