Wellington’s Dom Polski, home to NZ’s Polish community, is quake-prone

Saturday, 10 June 2023

The capital’s Dom Polski, or Polish House, which has been a physical and spiritual home of Wellington’s Polish community since the mid-1960s, is earthquake-prone.

Those who hold authority over the building have until 2027 to rectify the situation. Options on the table include strengthening and renovation, or a total rebuild either on the current Riddiford St site in Newtown or a new location altogether.

While the Polish Association has commissioned due diligence reports of the options, preliminary estimates suggest the cost for strengthening would be more than $1 million, with the cost of renovation or rebuild being substantially more.

A push is now under way to fundraise for the revamp project, as the community is consulted on its preferred option for the building’s future.

Serving the community faithfully, and hosting an uncountable number of performances, dinners, lunches, dances, fairs, meetings and get-togethers through the years, the Dom Polski has become part of Newtown and wider Wellington’s cultural landscape since its establishment.

It has hosted many offshoot Polish groups, including bridge, chess and youth clubs, and has been home to the Wellington Polish School and served many other ethnic and community groups.

Elizabeth Polaczuk Rombel, the association’s Wellington-based president, said no plan had been set in stone yet. The building’s back wall was the main concern in a quake, and the association was exploring how it could possibly reconfigure the house if it was to strengthen the wall.

The three-floor building – which was originally a bakery – has significant overheads for insurance, rates and power, but the association met some of those costs by renting out part of the ground floor.

In the past, members of the community had given up their time to undertake repairs on the building. But as those people aged and became unable to help as much as usual, the Dom Polski had slowly been falling into a state of disrepair, Rombel said.

Many of its facilities were outdated and no longer fit for purpose. As an example, the building had no lift, only stairs, which made it inaccessible to the many older community members, parents with prams and pushchairs, and event organisers who had to lug gear between the levels.

Its kitchen was also particularly small, and there was no grassy outdoor area for leisure and recreational purpose. Its interior was cold, and there were no couches, bars or dedicated restaurants inside.

The building’s quake-prone status gave the association an opportunity to “reimagine” the Dom Polski, with options to expand its rental capacity and for-hire areas also a possibility, to help bring in more revenue.

In 2025, Wellington will for the first time host PolArt – an arts festival celebrating Polish cultural heritage of Polish Australians and New Zealanders – which added some time pressure to the revamp.

New Zealand’s Polish community was tightly knit, proud, and cared deeply about the Dom Polski, Rombel said. So much so that a survey from several years ago that asked community members about the future of the building evoked extremely emotive responses – with some comparing the removal of the house to being taken from their own homes by Russia during WWII.

Wellington had the largest Polish community in New Zealand, and could not be without a place of its own, Rombel said, not least because of the myriad of community events – diplomatic or otherwise – that would benefit from a dedicated meeting space and hub.

“It would be lovely to be able to take them somewhere … that’s not cold and stark,” Rombel said.

The first Dom Polski was located on Kenwyn Tce in Newtown and was purchased in 1950. But during the 1962 meeting of the Polish Association, it was decided a larger house was needed. The current premises was opened in 1965.

“The fact alone that this particular house has been serving Polish community in greater Wellington for … years shows that it’s not only a point of meeting … but foremost a place of reference for the Polish community in New Zealand,” said Polish Ambassador Grzegorz Kowal.

It was also a distinctive landmark, helping to define Wellington as a multicultural city, Kowal said.

But the Dom Polski as it stood was not enticing new generations of Polish New Zealanders to come and indulge in Polish food, books, and culture, Rombel said.

“I think that might have been a problem in the past – some of the older members didn’t see a spark in their children’s eyes – they thought their children wouldn’t be interested in the Polish House full stop.”

But there were many young Polish New Zealanders who wanted somewhere to congregate, Rombel said. “We are recreating ourselves for the future.”

It would be up to the association’s membership to make a final decision, as stakeholders and guardians of the building, by the end of the year.

New Zealand’s Polish community

Last year New Zealand celebrated 150 years of Polish settlement in Aotearoa. In 1872 the first ship with Polish immigrants on board arrived in New Zealand, in Lyttelton near Christchurch.

In 1944, 733 Polish refugee children and 105 adult caregivers sailed into Wellington Harbour on the General Randall. For them, it was the end of a long and perilous journey, having lost their families and homes, surviving deportation to the Soviet Union, forced labour in Siberian tundra, and evacuation to the Middle East.

About 1.7 million Polish people were deported to slave labour camps in Siberia after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939. Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 prompted Stalin to grant amnesty to Poles. But only 120,000 Polish prisoners were liberated, making their way south to Persia (now Iran), where they languished in refugee camps.

While most of the former soldiers joined free Polish forces fighting on the allied side, the Polish government-in-exile in London appealed for help finding temporary homes for the civilian refugees. In 1943, then prime minister Peter Fraser invited a group of Polish children to come to New Zealand for the duration of the war.

A camp for the children – dubbed ‘Little Poland’ – was established near Pahīatua in Wairarapa. Most of the refugees chose to settle in New Zealand after the war and became citizens, instead of returning to a post-war Poland under Stalin’s communist rule. Relatives joined some of them in the late 1940s, while a small number returned to Poland.

The Polish diaspora is one of the largest in the world, with about 20 million Poles and Polish descendents living outside of Poland, the vast majority of those living in Europe and North America.

New Zealand and Poland have “true closeness” as nations, fighting side by side during WWII during the Battle of Britain, Tobruk and Monte Casino, said Kowal.

In 1973 New Zealand and Poland formally established diplomatic relations.

Sources: New Zealand History, Wellington City Council, Grzegorz Kowal