A Newton Solney woman who had extraordinary life including fleeing the Nazi invasion, has died at the age of 102.

She escaped the Nazi hordes invading her native Poland only to suffer deportation and imprisonment at the hands of Stalin’s Russia.

Helena Wislocka was born on July 19, 1915, in the city of Lvov, a majority Polish settlement whose position on the disputed border of Eastern Europe would see it change hands many times.

Helena Wislocka has died at the age of 102

The transient nature of her childhood would be a precursor to the incredible journeys Helena would make later as a young adult caught up in the Second World War.

The family followed her father around the country in his job as a telephone engineer, finally settling in Katowice, in southern Poland, when she was about 13.

After leaving school she took a job in the post office before moving to Bielsko, near the Czech border, where she met her husband Stanislaw Wislocki, a surveyor.

After marrying in 1937 the couple’s bliss was shattered by Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which kick-started the Second World War. Helena was pregnant with her first child at the time.

Speaking to the Burton Mail in 2009 she said: "I was working in the telephone exchange and we got notice that the Germans were close to the border. I was told to go to the post office near the border and sabotage the equipment to stop the Germans using it."

Helena spent time in a Siberian labour camp before the Nazis turned against the Russians. She later helped the Polish army became the first troops to reach the ruins of Monte Cassino monastery

She did not do it and instead told her father who told them to, 'find someone else to do it; she's pregnant'.

"The next day cars started coming from the border packed with refugees and with people sitting on the roof – everyone was running away from the Germans. It was very frightening."

Ordered to evacuate to eastern Poland, the couple found themselves on a train bound for Lvov, the city of her birth, as the German Blitzkrieg continued to rage around them.

"We were bombarded by the Germans. We heard planes come over and then the ‘phut, phut, phut’ of their guns firing at the train. We ran to a little wood. We lost one of our suitcases, but we were safe."

Arriving in Russian-controlled Lvov, where she gave birth to her first child, Barbara, in December 1939 as the couple were reunited with family. But even then Helena found themselves in a scarcely less perilous position than if they had stayed to brave the Nazi onslaught in the west.

The Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, signed by the eponymous foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Germany respectively in August 1939 had included an agreement to carve Poland up between the two nations.

Her family celebrated her 100th birthday with a large display celebrating her incredible life

Stalin proved a barely preferable overlord to Hitler for the Poles in the east, around a million of whom, including Helena and her family, were forcibly transported to the Soviet Union to work.

It was the beginning of a nightmare three-week journey in deplorable conditions for the couple, their infant child, Mr Wislocki’s parents and his younger sister, Felicja.

Helena recalled for the Burton Mail: "They took us to the station and put us on a train in cattle trucks. There was straw on the floor and shelves which had been put up inside where we would sleep.

"There was about 60 people in a carriage – we were like sardines in a can. The only sanitation was a hole in the floor. Once a day they opened the doors and gave us some bread or soup."

Helena’s parents and sister, Zofia, had also been deported to Russia but on a different train.

When Helena arrived at a station, it met another train with her parents on. Her mother shouted over to her 'show me my first grandchild'.

"I went to get the baby to show her but the Russian soldier shut the door."

Helena never saw her father again – he would die of pneumonia while being held in a camp 1,000 miles away from Moscow. It would be six years before her mother and sister would be able to return home.

Helena with her husband Stanislaw, who died in 1982

Her own destination was a labour camp in Soswa, in the wastelands of the Siberian tundra.

She recalled: "There were about 100 of us in the camp and we had no homes to live in at first – they gave us the woods and told us the build our own houses.

"We had to work for food and they did not pay us very much. I was working cutting wood and sorting the bark from the trees. My husband was working pulling logs and sending them down the river. Sometimes the temperature was as low as -54C – he would come home with icicles on his arms."

Despite the appalling conditions, looking back, Helena said she was thankful she did not die, the fate suffered by so many sent to their doom in German-occupied western Poland.

She said: "Our camp was a little better than a concentration camp because you at least thought you might have a chance of surviving it. In a concentration camp you had no hope at all."

After a year-and-a-half in the Siberian labour camp, news of Helena's imminent release was hard for her to take in.

Their release came as a result of one of the most unexpected twists of the war. The Germans, in an act of audacious treachery, turned on their ally, invading the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Codenamed Operation Barbarossa, the invasion by more than 4.5 million troops, would be a turning point in the war.

A display created by her family for her 100th birthday

It resulted in the Russians joining the western allies and a resultant amnesty for all Poles on Russian soil.

"The next day, the Russians called my husband to their office and made him a proposition – stay and work for them as a surveyor and they would give us a house, clothes, food – whatever we needed.

"He came back and said 'pack your bags – we are leaving on the 4pm train'. We were on a train in a few hours."

The couple, along with Mr Wislocki's parents and his sister, headed south in search of warmer climes – a two-month journey on foot and in trains packed with displaced people and rife with disease.

The conditions on the trains would lead to tragedy for the family, claiming the life of Helena 's first-born child, Barbara, one of 60 children of the train to succumb to diphtheria.

"We had to bury her alone. The train stopped – we did not know how long for as they never told us – and we rushed out to a cemetery and buried her quickly, wrapped in a white sheet. She was only two-years-old."

Helena, herself, became ill with typhoid but deliberately hid her condition from the Russian guards to avoid being taken to hospitals teeming with the sick and dying.

Helena and Stanislaw chose to remain in the UK following the end of the war

"I wouldn’t have survived, it was safer on the train."

The Poles gravitated south, where the Polish army in exile was gathering and Helena 's husband and father-in-law left them to enlist as she, along with her mother-in-law and niece, continued to journey south.

After wandering through the wastes of Kazakhstan, the three encountered a Polish army officer on horseback who told them to head south to Krasnovodsk - now Turkmenbashi, in modern day Turkmenistan on the Caspian Sea, where the army was mobilising.

She recalled: "We managed to get on the last ship across to Tehran, in Iran."

Iran was a crossroads for the hordes of displaced Poles. While her parents-in-law and niece were sent, along with other refugees, to Africa, where they lived out the war, Helena was reunited with her youngest sister, Stanislawa, and eventually with her husband, now a sergeant serving in the 9th Polish Division.

Joining the Polish Women's Army in order to stay close to her husband, she served with the 3rd Carpathian Brigade in Iraq, where she worked in the canteen and took part in cultural activities.

After several months in Iraq Helena travelled with the Polish army through Syria to Palestine, where she earned her army driving licence and enlisted in the Women's Transport Company, which supplied the army with ammunition and food.

Her 100th birthday display charted her life through the Second World War and beyond

Crossing the Mediterranean Sea, the army landed in southern Italy, to join the Allied assault on German forces in that country.

There, the Polish army would play a significant role in one of the most hard-fought battles of the latter stages of the war, becoming the first troops to successfully reach the hilltop ruins of Monte Cassino monastery – which remained a source of pride for Helena throughout her life.

She said: "The French had been sent in, couldn’t manage it and came back. They sent the Poles in and we were first to put our flags there. The English came afterwards and put their flag up but we felt proud because we were the first."

Helena and her husband were eventually demobilised to England. They chose not to return to their homeland.

Helena has died at the age of 102

she said: "We were told to go back to Poland but we said 'no'. We didn’t fight for a Communist country – we fought for a free country like you have in Britain.

"Some people went overseas to start a new life - you could go to Africa or South America, but my husband said it was too far from Poland and that one day we might be able to go back there, or at least visit."

She and her husband, who died in 1982, would never return to live in their homeland, instead building a new life for themselves in the UK.

After a spell in a temporary camp set up for Poles in north Wales, where their daughter Magda was born, the couple moved to Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, where, like many Poles, Mr Wislocki found work as a mining surveyor at the Appleby Frodingham steelworks.

The town would be the birthplace of the couple's son, Antoni.

The couple watched from afar as their homeland continued to suffer under the yoke of Communism before finally returning to freedom under Lech Walesa, who was elected president of Poland in December 1990.

Helena 's visits to Poland before the fall of the Iron Curtain scarcely improved her opinion of life under Communism.

"It was awful in those days. I remember going to the shop to buy some meat and they would just give it you on a small bit of paper. You would ask the girl serving if she could wrap it for you and she would just snap at you – 'cover it yourself'."

Helena moved to Newton Solney after the death of her husband to be close to her daughter, who lives in the village.

Helena died on Sunday, January 14, aged 102 and leaves her two children, eight grandchildren and 13 great grandchildren

Her funeral will be held at 11am on Tuesday, January 30, at St Mary and Modwen's Church Burton. This will be followed by a cremation ceremony at Bretby Crematorium at noon. Family flowers only. Donations in memory of Helena can be sent to the Royal National Institute of the Blind.