Warrnambool man's shares tragic memories of childhood in Poland during WWII.

"I'd rather forget it," he said. But his childhood memories are something he has had to live with "all the time".

"You see what's happening on the news. Nowhere to go, nowhere to live, everything has been bombed or knocked about or burnt," he said.

It is vision that takes his mind back to where he was born in Poland which he said, after the war, became part of Ukraine. "Where I was born in Poland I think it has gone to Ukraine, the border has been changed," he said.

And he has not been able to forget the events of 1942 and 1943 when he was about six years old.

He said when Russian soldiers burst into his home, everyone "skedaddled". "They came in and shot everybody," he said.

His memory is faint, but he witnessed his father get shot in the back as he was trying to escape out the window.

"We tried to tell him to go down under the house into the cellar, but no," he said.

His teenage relatives across the road were also killed.

"One was shot in bed. She was shot the way she was," he said, describing how she was resting her face on her fist lying in bed when the soldiers burst into the room.

"The other tried to get up into the attic. She got a little bit up the ladder and they shot her."

He doesn't know what happened to their parents. "It was a circus up there during the war," he said.

"Just seeing those people shot was enough."

They are memories he says he doesn't feel like talking about. "It stays in the old scone in there."

The village where he lived was the size of Allansford, he said.

"And the only people that got out is us and another couple out of the whole town," Mr Kirchner said.

Hungarian soldiers took the family to Budapest but they were later taken back to Germany.

"When we were on the train in Germany ready to go to a concentration camp, the train derailed and they shifted us to another train and we never went to Auschwitz," he said. "Luckily. That's why I'm here."

For about five years the family was constantly shuffled between 24 different camps and schools.

"We just went from one place to another," Mr Kirchner said. "We were what they used to call displaced persons."

To satisfy the hunger pains, he used to eat boiled potatoes and stinging nettles. "There was nothing else. You survived the best you could," he said.

In the early 1950s they sailed to Melbourne aboard the Fairsea. "I was out on the boat Christmas Eve. I remember that," he said.

It was memorable because to celebrate they "soap everybody up" like Father Christmas' white beard, Mr Kirchner said. "That's where I tasted my first orange. I never liked it since," he said with a laugh.

After arriving in Australia, the family was taken the Bonegilla migrant camp near Wodonga before they were sent to Geelong.

His mother got a job in Corio working at Geelong Grammer School in the kitchen, and was there when Prince Charles visited the school.

"I didn't see him but Mum was there," Mr Kirchner said.

His brother and sisters were sent to separate orphanages to live until they could be reunited with their mum.

"You had no choice. They just put you there and that was it," he said.

Mr Kirchner left school and went to work for International Harvesters making tractors before taking a job on the railways.

A fireman, he used to "shovel coal" on the trains from Melbourne to Port Fairy, which is where he met his wife Margaret. She also worked for the railways, opening the wooden gates for trains before there were automated crossings.

He then went to work at the Warrnambool Woollen Mill in South Warrnambool while driving taxis between shifts.

"That's about all I can tell you," he said.

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