SITTING in the living-room of a Manningham flat, I listened to Vera Smereka’s life unfold.

As a child in 1930s Ukraine, she survived the Holodomor, a starvation which killed 10 million people. It began for Vera with a “tall man in a grey fur hat with a revolver” ordering her family to leave their home.

Farmers reluctant to join Stalin’s collectives were turfed out, executed or sent to Siberia; Soviet officials went from village to village, taking crops, food, animals. What saved Vera was that her family was sheltered in secret, surviving on soup made from weeds.

Aged 19, she was sent to a Nazi labour camp; ripped from her family, with other young people, and forced at gunpoint onto a cattletruck.

“It was like a hysterical mass funeral,” said Vera, who later escaped from the camp, helped by her future husband, a resistance fighter. After the war the couple came to Bradford. Vera worked in a mill and as a nurse at St Luke’s Hospital, and co-founded the Federation of Ukrainians in Bradford. She died in 2010, aged 87.

What I find remarkable is that you can walk past someone like Vera in a Bradford street and not give them a second thought - yet the story of how they got here would fill a book.

This week Refugee Week celebrates the contribution that refugees make and highlights why people seek sanctuary. As a journalist, I have met people who came here as refugees; some after the war, some in recent years. At Bradford’s Polish Club, I met survivors of Stalin’s brutal Siberia deportations. One woman, Daniela, recalled the bitter February night in 1940 when Russian soldiers banged at the door.

Her family was told to pack what possessions they could and minutes later they were in a convoy of horse-drawn carts, the snowy silence broken by the cries of children and abandoned animals. What followed was a long journey by packed cattletruck, in minus-40 degrees. Along the way Daniela saw, through the darkness, her mother passing a bundle to a soldier - “I was shaking not only from cold but fear, as I realised the bundle was my little brother,” she recalled. Like many, he didn’t make it to Siberia.

Over two years, 1.7 million men, women and children were taken from Russian-occupied Poland to Siberian camps. “We were told ‘if you don’t work, you don’t eat,” recalled another survivor. The forced labour included building railways, felling trees, coal-mining. At least half the deportees perished, from exhaustion and disease.

After the war, with nothing to return home to, thousands of refugees settled in Britain where industrial cities, like Bradford, had work. Even getting here was traumatic. Talking to a Polish couple in the Eccleshill semi they’d lived in for 51 years, I learned of the long journeys they had each taken from Siberia as children; via Africa, Persia, Kazakhstan, living on rotting vegetables and what they could steal. It took them six years to end up in Britain. “We were displaced people - they called us DPs,” they said. “We had only the clothes we stood up in.”

The social clubs set up here - Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Latvian and Estonian among them - are testament to how these communities thrived in Bradford.

More recently I met a university-educated teacher who came over from Zimbabwe to visit his terminally-ill daughter. Warned not to return to Zimbabwe, because he had opposed Mugabe, he ended up sleeping rough under newspapers on a roundabout. Eventually, after a bewildering amount of red tape setbacks, he claimed asylum and five years later, refugee status.

In recent weeks Britain has been shaken by terrible events aimed at dividing communities. It is worth remembering, in Refugee Week, that Bradford has long been a sanctuary to people in crisis, and the support they have found here is based on the notion of working together, rather than against each other.

"I LIKE it warm, but I don't like it this warm!"

I remember women of my grandma's age saying this as they rolled up their cardigan sleeves on a sweltering day. I know how they feel. This week it was hotter overnight in parts of the UK than in Istanbul during the day. I know we're meant to collectively bask in the heatwave, but I'm not very good at basking. I don't really like the sun, to be honest. It burns my skin, turns me pink and makes me exhausted and irritable.

One good thing about the Summer Solstice - the nights will soon be drawing in again....