Kasia (Katrina) Lukaszewicz - Escaping to a better life…

Growing up under strict Communist rule in Poland, highly respected Queenstown osteopath Kasia (Katrina) Lukaszewicz saved £900 waitressing in London to marry a random Irishman in a bid to escape.

As a uni English Literature student, she was permitted to visit London once a year to further her English, however, at the end of her final year in 1980 Kasia didn’t return home.

“Russian troops were on the Polish border ready to invade. I didn’t tell my parents before I left as I couldn’t afford to have it slip,” she says.

She worked for cash waitressing in London for a few years to save the necessary £900 to “buy” an Irish husband – Patrick Joseph O’Neill, who she recalls “had no teeth”. “My workmates told me about this Polish guy who you could pay big money to, and he’d find you an Irish husband,” she says. “We’d never met and married in a registry office then I never saw him again and never wanted to,” she says.

As a child everyone had the same – her father a highly qualified Professor of Medicine in a large hospital was paid the same as the cleaner. “We didn’t realise as we had nothing to compare it with.”

Special permission was required just to visit the West, passports handed in, her medical parents – her mother a gynecologist, only allowed to travel for business on approved occasions. “We just went on holiday to Eastern Bloc countries.” Her mother was paid for her obstetric services in a side of beef or pork. “Apart from that growing up was normal like here. Due to their jobs, my parents got preference for one of the Fiat 126 cars that you applied for from a pool.”

Thankfully, in the 1980s British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan, stepped in, aided by a lighter approach from Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “If it hadn’t been for them the Russians would’ve invaded Poland. My father always said it was coming.”

Once Solidarity came Kasia, who’d had to change her name to ‘Katrina O’Neill’ – a name she recently changed back to her Polish ‘Kasia’ Lukaszewicz (her husband’s surname), could return home to see her parents on her Irish passport. “The Communists couldn’t touch me.” Until then she’d had to write them a letter explaining. With free student tuition under Communist rule, her parents were forced to pay her uni fees when she didn’t return. “They wanted a better life for me.”

Accepted for Medical School in Poland, she’d felt it was more important to escape Poland. Fittingly, while in London her mum asked a friend’s son, Kris Lukaszewicz, who’d married an English girl for the same reasons of convenience, to deliver Christmas parcels to Kasia from home. “I took him out to lunch to thank him. We then had dinner, and he came back to my digs and never left,” she laughs, marrying six years later.

After working various cash jobs in London, for a Japanese travel agency and proofing English medical journals, Kasia discovered osteopathy and retrained while a young mum of two kids. That led to a job with a fellow student who just happened to be Terry Chimes the drummer from punk rock band, The Clash. “Terry, who was also drummer for Mick Jagger and other famous musicians, had switched to chiropractic. He had the money so set up a multi-disciplinary practice and asked me to work for him as the osteopath.”

She worked there for five years until, after 20 years in London, she and Kris opted for a working holiday in New Zealand and Australia – their children then 11 and seven. “We thought for two or three years. We never left.”

They experienced an infestation of earwigs in one home and survived the stench of the 1999 Queenstown floods, but the kindness of Kiwis won them over and they settled in well.

Kasia worked for Jacqui Driver before setting up Queenstown Osteopathy.

In 2016, struck by a need from a dear patient in her 90s who struggled to find anyone qualified to talk about death and dying, Kasia launched her own fundraising campaign for a Hospice nurse to be based locally. She ran a Givealittle campaign and a sponsored half marathon, shaving off her beautiful long hair at the finish line, raising $4000 towards the cause. “I couldn’t find anyone locally in the health field who said they’d been trained in that. My patient said the nearest Hospice nurse was in Invercargill, only visiting twice a month,” Kasia says.

“I always think paying something forward is a good way to be. If a person on the receiving end does something kind and pays it forward that’s payment enough for me.”

Four years ago, Kasia’s son and his partner encouraged her into CrossFit, then aged 64. “I got hooked!” she says. Next month (October) she competes in her second Australasian Master League CrossFit Games in Australia at 68, with fellow local Annie Oliver, 71, after placing fourth last year.