The young Polish woman and her future husband had made their way from their scarred homeland, heading towards Allied-occupied Germany, searching for a new start.

Outside a railway station in the battered German city, the couple saw a former soldier, bedraggled and still wearing his uniform, as he picked up cigarette butts.

Until recently, he could well have been one of those troops giving orders and making life hard for Alina and her loved ones in the town of Wizajny, in north-eastern Poland, when her country was under Nazi rule. But now the veteran couldn't even afford cigarettes and a bus ticket.

So Alina and her sweetheart, Czeslaw, who had fought against the Germans, bought him what he needed.

"No matter what happened, people are people," says Alina Kizeweter, reflecting on this act of kindness 75 years earlier.

Alina Kizeweter is a portrait of dignity and quiet resilience. The 94-year-old is quick to smile. Her smile is not only engaging, it helped save her from German troops during the war.

"Sometimes I was arrested, but because I was smiling, they let me go," Mrs Kizeweter says.

Born in 1925, Alina was a teenager when the German forces tore into her homeland. In 1939, on the first day of the war, she was on her way to the train station to hand out food to Polish troops, when the Germans bombed a nearby factory. She was showered in shattered glass.

But the 14-year-old pushed on to the station to fulfill her duty, "because I wanted a free Poland!".

For years, freedom seemed a distant dream.

"We were allowed to move in daytime but from 6 o'clock at night to 6 o'clock in the morning, they would arrest us right away if we moved," Mrs Kizeweter says. "You had to accept everything they were telling you, otherwise you ended up in a concentration camp."

Memories of those days help ensure Alina Kizeweter isn't phased by governments' restrictions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I accept them," she says. "I know they're trying to save us from spreading the sickness.

"But I still break out! I go shopping."

Seeing stripped supermarket shelves and dealing with the rationing of products have been nothing new to Alina Kizeweter.

"It doesn't affect me," she shrugs. "I know it [the products] will come here. But there was no hope in Poland."

During the war, she recalls, "there wasn't anything to ration". Food was hard to come by, and the bread was so dense, "when you dropped this on your foot, you could have broken your toes".

"During the years of the German occupation, I only once got eggs. And they were so old, they were dry inside!"

In 1945, leaving behind the war-torn past and the prospect of life under another occupier, the Russians, Alina and Czeslaw headed to Allied-occupied Germany.

There, they began shaping their future. They married and in 1946 had the first of two daughters. But settling, creating a home, was difficult. Then, in 1949, came the offer to start anew in a faraway country.

"We could go to America, to England, France," she recounts. "I said, 'With a three-year-old child, and what we went through in the war, I don't want to stay in Europe or close to it'.

"My husband said, 'Where do you want to go?' I said, 'Australia'."

In August 1949, the Kizeweter family docked in Sydney on board a ship bringing migrants from the Old World to the new. No sooner had she arrived than Alina was separated from her daughter, Judy, who had an infection. The little girl was hospitalised in Sydney, and Alina was sent to a migrant camp in Bathurst.

"For six weeks, I telephoned the hospital daily, asking for my daughter," Mrs Kizeweter recalls. "And they said, 'She's in a good state, and don't worry about her. She has to stay here'."

So for Alina Kizeweter, the present ideas of social distancing and isolation pale in comparison with that experience.

The Kizeweters moved to Newcastle in 1950, when Czeslaw was employed at the BHP steelworks. His wife's first impressions of her new home were less than rosy. Actually, they were coal dust-coated and gritty.

"Newcastle, it was a cowboy city," she laughs.

But the city grew on her. Alina Kizeweter has been a leader and teacher in the Polish-Novocastrian community. She lost her husband five years ago. But Alina still finds reasons to smile, even in the midst of a pandemic. She reads books or spends time in her garden. She is happy.

"Because there's nothing to be any other way," she says. "Worry wouldn't help at all. I do get moments where I'm sad or getting depressed, but it doesn't last."

Alina Kizeweter turns 95 on May 28. She has five grandchildren and five great grandkids, but she doesn't expect to be able to celebrate her birthday with her family.

So what will she do?

"Nothing. What can I do?," she replies. "Maybe just say, 'Thank God for every help'."

But she does have a wish for life after COVID-19.

"It should have an effect on our lives," Alina Kizeweter says. "We are quite nice to each other now. We should stay like this."

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