Orphan of war was ‘mother’ to hundreds
Teresa Noble-Campbell teacher
b September 3, 1936
d January 22, 2020
During Europe’s coldest winter of the 20th century, Teresa Noble-Campbell and her family made a perilous escape from a forced labour camp in Russia to the Caspian Sea.
The year before, in 1940, the Russian secret police had deported them to Yeglets, a logging camp in the northwestern region of the country.
Only she and two siblings would survive the attempt to reach the Polish Army and relative safety.
By the age of 7, the young orphan had endured far more than most would in a lifetime. But Noble-Campbell was a survivor and, despite growing up motherless, she managed to mother hundreds of children during a long and celebrated teaching career.
She was born in 1936, the second youngest of five children, in Ulanowszczyzna, a farming settlement in the Nowogrodek region of what was at the time Eastern Poland.
The village was home to only nine families, who were given the land by the Polish Government as military settlers in the early 1920s.
During that perilous journey through the blizzards of 1941’s brutal winter, her parents and two siblings perished. Noble-Campbell, her sister Irena and brother Felek survived, but became separated.
Placed in different orphanages, it was miraculous that she and Irena – a beloved sister she would remain close to their whole lives – were reunited when they found themselves among 7000 Polish children evacuated to Tehran.
In 1944, at the behest of former prime minister Peter Fraser, who agreed to find the children a haven in the safety of New Zealand, Noble-Campbell and her sister were evacuated for the duration of the war to the Polish Children’s Camp in Pahiatua.
‘‘Little Poland’’, as it became known, was a home away from home for NobleCampbell and 732 other children. Here, their culture and language were maintained in the expectation that at the end of the war they would return to their home and reunite with their families.
The postwar political loss of Eastern Poland to the Soviet Union meant that was not to be.
She and her sister became boarders at Mercy College in Timaru, where they were to learn in English for the first time.
Irena left Timaru in 1951, for Wellington Teachers’ College and, when Noble-Campbell finished her schooling in 1953, Irena recommended that she too train to be a teacher.
Noble-Campbell accepted the advice of her sister, enrolling the following year and moving to the Polish Girls’ Hostel (Ngaroma), on Queens Drive in Lyall Bay. It was while at Wellington Teachers’ College that she met her future husband, Bernard Noble-Campbell, at a dance arranged by the social club.
At the time, she was not a New Zealand citizen and, with the Cold War heating up, Bernard’s father Cedric was concerned that his son’s fiancee might be sent back to communist Poland.
Using his parliamentary contacts, Cedric fast-tracked her permanent residency application, which was granted by the government, two days before her marriage to Bernard in 1957.
They bought land in the newly expanding town of Paeka¯ ka¯ riki, where they would live for the next 46 years.
During her almost four decades-long career, she taught hundreds of children, first in Kilbirnie and Miramar and later on the Ka¯ piti Coast, at St Patrick’s, Ka¯ piti, Kenakena, Paraparaumu, Paeka¯ ka¯ riki and Raumati South schools.
She maintained a focus on teaching new entrants, becoming a widely admired and loved motherly figure for all those attending school for the first time.
Known for never raising her voice but generating the respect of her pupils through her gentle but firm approach, Noble-Campbell taught generations of families over her long career in the classroom. Many of those past pupils were there to pay their respects at her funeral last month.
In the late 1970s, with a renewed interest in her past life in Poland, she tracked down her brother Felek with the help of the Red Cross, eventually finding him in Guildford, England.
In 2004, she became one of the first Polish children to reclaim her citizenship and, two years later, she received the Siberian Exiles Cross, a state decoration awarded by the president of Poland to recognise and commemorate the sufferings of Polish citizens deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan and northern Russia from 1939-56.
Mother to four, grandmother to nine and great-grandmother to one, Noble-Campbell credited her sister Irena for rescuing her from the abyss by being a motherly presence throughout their lives together in New Zealand until Irena’s death last year.
She remained married to Bernard, who survives her, for 62 years, the last few together in Sprott House in Karori.