Katarzyna Cichy was cooking New Year’s Eve dinner for friends when she received a text message that she will never forget. It said simply “please phone” and gave a name and a number. Cichy called. The dinner was never finished. The 31-year-old historian spent hours on the phone that night making sure that what had long seemed impossible would now take place: a reunion between her 67-year-old mother and 89-year-old grandmother after a separation that had lasted 66 years and touched four generations of the family. Thanks to Cichy’s efforts, the two women spoke by phone the next day, January 1 2009, and met a week later at her mother’s house for the biggest family party anybody can remember. “At first I could not really believe it was happening,” Cichy recalls. “But as soon as I saw my grandmother, I knew straightaway it was my grandmother. It was all a mixture of joy and sadness. My mother had lived her whole life without a mother.”

Ludmila at her home near the German border

Cichy’s grandmother, Paulina Jasinska, was separated from Cichy’s mother, Ludmila, during the second world war, after German and Soviet troops invaded their native Poland. One June day in 1942, when Ludmila was an infant, the 22-year-old Paulina went to buy bread. While she was out, German troops descended on the family’s hometown of Sokal, near Lvov, and rounded up able-bodied Poles for forced labour in ­Germany. The prisoners were not given even a moment to say goodbye; Paulina was picked up in the street and taken straight to a convoy heading west.