The Australian Women's Register

1 hour 35 minutes ’Sonia’ was born in Rzew in Russia and spent the first nine years of her life on the family farm. After her father’s death her mother moved the family to a city where she and her daughters worked in a factory. In 1941 Sonia was forced to go to Germany to work in a labour camp. At the end of the war she was alone, with a new name, and searching for a way out of Germany when she met her future husband, a Ukrainian, and they married and decided to emigrate together with their young son. Sonia describes the voyage in the ‘Jenny Rose Stewart’ and their stay at the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre in Victoria. The family was shifted to Mildura in South Australia, where Sonia worked as a farm labourer, and then to Woodside for one an a half years where Sonia’s daughter was born. The family then bought a block of land and built their own home. Sonia describes getting herself a job at the Royal Adelaide Hospital as a domestic, which she remained in for 30 years. Sonia made no contact with local ethnic clubs and concludes by describing her family’s development.