Agnieszka Critchlow

"Luckily they were nice to me because it was a big thing in America. They normally 'marketed' us a lot – there was an amazing propaganda to adopt children from communist countries. There were newspaper articles about us and our images were on the covers. So, when I went to the store, I saw my picture everywhere. And of course we lived around Chicago at the time, where there's a big Polish community there. And they were like 'wow.'

"It happened completely by chance. At that time I met, or my teacher at school introduced me to people who were from America. At that time it was rather unusual. In Poland, I think there were twenty people from America altogether. They worked for embassy. Moreover, two of them—their names were Donald and Pat—came over there for a year to teach American history. Which was such a big exception. And they decided to adopt my sister and me completely by accident."