South Essex: From labour camp to welcoming Britain...

Families packed together in tiny hotel bedsits, or else housed in damp, rubbish-strewn flats, some of them living in fear of their neighbours - helping asylum-seekers who have come to Southend is all in a day's work for interpreter Jadzia Haughton.

The 44-year-old mother-of-three, herself the child of Polish refugees who fled the Russians during the Second World War, works with Polish and Czech immigrants, most of them gipsies fleeing social oppression in their native countries.

The vast majority of them do not speak a word of English and face enormous difficulties in getting even the most basic help during their stay here (because they are not classed as casualties of war, most are now deported after a few months).

Working with Southend's social services, Jadzia's role is to liaise and translate between hospitals, schools and the police. She is also on hand one day a week to help with housing problems.

A serene, capable woman, Jadzia, who lives in Westcliff, admits the work can be frustrating. "These people are in need," she explains.

"I see a lot of families squeezed into one room, then I see them put in flats where the windows are broken and there is rubbish.

"I know one family who have neighbours who are very antagonistic. They bang on the walls. These people are nervous wrecks, tip-toeing around. They have no life at all."

She says sub-standard accommodation and a poor diet recently lead to an outbreak of scabies - yet doctors at a central Southend practice were not prepared to treat the refugees because they could not speak English, despite being told by social services the condition from which they suffered.

Instead the asylum-seekers had to be sent to the over-stretched Accident and Emergency department at Southend Hospital.

Another family who have a four-year-old boy with cerebral palsy have received no therapy for the little lad since they arrived in Southend a year ago.

It was only recently that Jadzia accompanied the parents to their first appointment.

Similarly, it's disheartening when refugee children have to traipse halfway across Southend to go to a school that will accept them.

"You can understand why some schools do refuse because they haven't got the specialist teachers," Jadzia concedes.

"But it makes it even more of a struggle for these families. They don't know bus routes. All these people are trying to make a life for themselves, but it is very difficult."

She pauses. "No-one comes from a country willingly, despite what's being said. They left homes and lives.

"Some of them cheat the system, but it's nothing compared to some of the landlords in Southend who milk the Government by charging high rents on terrible accommodation."

Jadzia's compassion for this disadvantaged group is palpable, and is driven by the experiences of her own parents, who suffered trauma, hunger and heartache in their own formative years, but who went on to build successful lives for themselves once they reached England.

She and her two brothers had been steeped in Polish culture and traditions as children and were bi-lingual, but until ten months ago she had little knowledge of the refugee issue.

A successful graphic designer until leaving work to bring up her three children, Christina, nine, Gavin, eight and Michael, five, Jadzia had been a full-time mother who was now looking for some sort of work when her youngest started school.

It was only a routine visit to her doctor's practice which opened her eyes to the problem - and began a completely different change of career.

In the waiting room were two women, huddled together, unable to understand a word of English. After ascertaining from the bewildered receptionist that the women were Czech, Jadzia spoke to them in Polish, a language which is so similar to Czech it sounds like a dialect - although she didn't know until she opened her mouth whether or not she would be understood.

From there she had an interview with Southend social services, who, one can imagine, must have mentally kissed her hands in gratitude for appearing on the scene. She has been kept busy ever since.

Jadzia has a distaste for the opprobrium which is heaped upon the heads of asylum seekers.

As a child of two refugees herself, she flourished. Born and brought up in Leicester, she was sent to a private convent boarding school, which she loved, from the ages of 11 to 18.

From there she went to art college in Loughborough and then worked as a graphic designer for a variety of advertising agencies, eventually meeting and marrying her husband Andrew, a desktop publishing manager.

Her own life has been fulfilling. It's a shame that many of the people she helps are not so fortunate.

Prescription for help - A chance encounter in her doctor's waiting room led Jadzia to use her fluent Polish and parents' refugee background to work with a new generation of refugee problems

Picture: STEPHEN LLOYD

Labour camp at 11...

Jadzia's mother Alicja Koltonowska, now 72, was sent with her family on cattle trucks to a Siberian labour camp by the Russians during the Second World War when she was just 11.

The middle-class farmers were forced to flee their land and home, leaving everything they owned to the Soviet army.

The conditions at the labour camp were atrocious. Temperatures reached -40C. A "treat" was porridge made with a drop of oil and watered down to a soup-like consistency - and disease was rife. Alicja contracted typhoid, malaria and pneumonia and her mother nearly died.

After two years the family, like many Poles, were allowed to leave and made their own way south to the Caspian Sea and by a packed boat to what is now Iran.

Because two of her brothers had joined the British Air Force, the family came to England in 1947. Alicja soon met her husband, also a Pole, who had been a member of the flying elite - a Lancaster rear gunner involved in the bombing of Dresden.

She learned English, enrolled at college, and worked her way up from school cook to area catering supervisor for her local education authority.

She and her husband, an engineer draftsman, scrimped and saved to give Jadzia a private education. For years, Alicja refused to discuss her past. Even after 50 years still weeps at the memories.

"We never wanted to leave Poland," she sobs in broken English. "The country is like a magnet to us, it was our youth, but we could never return."

Jadzia's father's family were aristocrats who had also been kicked out by the Russians, leaving a beautiful ancestral home.

The family had buried jewels, silver and other valuables before leaving, but it's believed they had been dug up.

The family home is now divided into shabby apartments.

Sent to Siberia - Alicja Koltonowska, Jadzia's mother, came to England in the 1940s

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.