POLISH workers have flocked to the UK over the last three years looking for jobs. Nearly 2,000 came to work in Gloucestershire in the last year and around 200 of those live in the Stroud district.

However, the Polish community who came over in the 1960s had very different reasons for moving to the country.

More than 150 Poles lived in Dursley in the 1960s after escaping the miserable refugee camps in Germany.

Stefan Nawrot, 85, from Poland, has lived in Dursley for 47 years and has never been back to his native country. For him it carries too many painful memories. He told Gazette reporter Claire Marshall the story of how his family was rescued from German camps and given a new life in Dursley.

STEFAN Nawrot has reason to be happy today after a life of extreme poverty and sadness as a young man.

"In 1960 I was living in a refugee house shared with 12 families. My wife, her mother, myself and our two children lived in one small room with a kitchen.

"We shared a boiler room for washing in with six other families," said Stefan.

After the war the Germans needed to find places to put the refugees and called on other countries to help.

The British Government housed many Polish refugees and Dursley Town Council agreed to adopt two families - the Nawrots were one of them.

"When we got to Dursley we had a house waiting for us, with furniture and food and everything we needed. We cried from happiness," said Stefan.

"My wife, Katarzyna, said Who lives upstairs?' because she could not believe we had so much space.

"Our sons, Tedeusz and Izydor, went to Dursley Primary School and then to Rednock School and we were so proud because they went to university.

"They would never have had so many opportunities if we had not come to England."

Stefan, a tailor by trade, lived in a part of Poland that is now the Ukraine before the Second World War.

His father was taken to Siberia by the Russians and killed. He and his mother were taken to labour camps in Germany.

"I thought eventually I would be able to go back to Poland but it was run by communists.

"Now at last Poland is free. But I have never been back to where I lived, it is too painful for me to revisit, to many bad memories."

Stefan is now a well-known character among the Polish community in Dursley, mostly for his jovial personality and his banjo performances at Polish Mass.

He added: "I love living in Dursley. England gave me and my family so many opportunities, I will never move."