One of the first memories of Luba Wein née Boyko is hiding from a nurse at Greta Migrant Camp.
"I was four years old when George, my brother, was born at the camp," the 73-year-old said. "Children weren't allowed in the hospital so when a nurse came along, my Dad would say, "Quick, get under the bed!"
The Cliftleigh Meadows resident has salvaged one of the few remnants of the demolished camp: a European rose growing around the foundations of its hospital, where her brother was born almost seventy years ago.
A clipping of the pale pink rose is featured in a new memorial garden for the thousands of migrants who have called Greta home. Hunter Multicultural Communities opened the memorial at its Waratah centre on Monday.
Jason Scriven, HMC business development manager, said the organisation established the marker to ensure there was a place for the camp's former residents, and their relatives, to reflect.
Ms Wein's journey to Greta began when her parents, Anastazia and Mychajlo, met in a camp for displaced persons in Goslar, Germany, at the end of the World War II. They had both been taken from their homeland of Ukraine by Nazis for use as forced labor.
Ms Wein arrived as a child with her parents in Sydney in 1949 and lived in Greta for a year, after which her family moved to Barnsley.
Ms Wein said she originally found the "Greta Rose" when she returned to the site 10 years ago.
"Because it was near the hospital I felt it must have been planted by a migrant who wanted to grow something. In that way it represented all the people who came through the camp," she said.
Ms Wein and Margaret Kenning, a member and garden co-ordinator for Hunter Multicultural Communities, picked out some of the bush that day with their bare fingers. Ms Kenning, 76, designed the new memorial using bricks from Greta, and propagated the rose clipping, which Ms Wein has looked after for the past decade.
Ms Kenning said the arrival of migrants in New Lambton, where she grew up, after the war was a significant childhood memory.
"They were happy, lovely people," she said. "My dad, who worked at BHP with lots of them, brought home little seeds which the migrants had brought over. He had a vegetable garden where all these weird and wonderful things would grow."
The 70th anniversary of the migrant camp and 80th anniversary of the army camp at Greta will be celebrated on November 9 and 10.
The memorial garden's seats are dedicated to HMC life-member and former Greta resident Vitaly "Victor" Lupish and current HMC president Robert Bell.
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