Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
4:23 | While in the concentration camp, Maria McClough and the rest of the prisoners were guarded by soldiers with machine guns and guard dogs. Fortunately, General Wladyslaw Sikorski was able to help free many Polish people from the clutches of these camps, and so she and her siblings were shipped out of Siberia and over to Tehran, Iran. While there, her father found them but wasn't able to bring them back with him.
Keywords : Maria McClough guard machine gun guard dog Wladyslaw Sikorski general Polish freedom ship Tehran Iran father World War II malnourished Russian food watermelon Red Cross Africa Poland
Originally from Poland, Maria McClough was born into a rather large family with four siblings of which she was the youngest. Her father was in the Polish Army before the invasion of Germany from the west and Russia from the east. Soon after her family was separated by the Russians, and she was put on cattle wagons with her mother and two of her siblings. At one point on the trip they were stranded on the wagons because of a railroad track bombing and didn't have any food or water for three days.
The Russians used the cattle wagons to transport McClough with her mother and two siblings to Siberia. They were put in barracks along with incredibly malnourished prisoners that were already being kept there. While she was deemed too young to work, her mother was forced to strip bark off of trees, and eventually was worked to death. McClough and her siblings were lucky if they got one meal per day.
After being sent to Tehran and then to Africa, where she attended school, McClough was transported in to Yorkshire, England and lived in "camps." These camps, however, were much different and nicer than concentration camps. A few years after the war ended, she went to work on an airbase. There, she met her future husband.
After working on an American base in Europe, McClough went over to America in 1957. She has lived in Tucson, Arizona with her husband and retired there many years later. She gives her final thoughts about WWII and what she wants the younger generations to remember about it.
