'We cannot go back, we cannot go forward'

By Michael Gordon and Jane Lee
Updated April 26 2014 - 11:08am, first published April 25 2014 - 3:13pm
Halinka Rubin vividly recalls leaving Poland on a train, with no passport. Photo: Penny Stephens
Halinka Rubin vividly recalls leaving Poland on a train, with no passport. Photo: Penny Stephens

Halinka Rubin can still recall the sad, empty, lonely feeling as she stood on a platform at Gdanski railway station in September 1968, about to leave her country without a passport but with a travel document that said not what she was but what she was not. Valid for three more days, it declared she was no longer a citizen of Poland.