Give Us This Day

Now out of print. See the paperback edition.

In June 1944, when 14-year-old Stefan Wiśniewski stood by his mother’s dusty Tehran grave, he knew his world was about to change again, forever.

Give Us This Day: a Memoir of Family and Exile explores the story of one of the 732 Polish child survivors of wartime Soviet deportation offered unlikely refuge in New Zealand. Seventy years later, and no closer to a longed-for Polish homecoming, Stefan’s New Zealand-born daughter revisits his past. What is the burden her father has carried all these years? And why is he unable – or unwilling – to let it go?

With an ageing father and the ghost of a namesake aunt as her guides, Helena Wiśniewska Brow searches for meaning in the family lives shaped by exile: her father’s, her mother’s and her own.

Cover by Keely O’Shannessy