Krystyna Wanda Jackiewicz was born Krystyna Wanda Kernberg in 1920 in Lvov (Lwów), then in eastern Poland. In 1940 with her mother and brother she was deported by the Soviet army to Kazakhstan to work in a labour camp, as one of the 1.7 million Poles deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan on Stalin's orders. Her father perished in the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyń in 1940. In 1941 she went to Iran with soldiers of General Władysław Anders' Polish army, then in 1943 sailed to Karachi where she worked as a nurse in a transit camp hospital and as secretary to the Maharaja of Kolhapur before migrating to Australia in 1947. In Australia she met and married Marian Jackiewicz. From her home in Hobart, Tasmania she wrote poetry and worked as a journalist with the Tasmanian Catholic monthly 'The Standard', and later as a teacher of English to migrants, and Polish to Australians. She died in 1977 and was awarded the 'Order Polonia Restituta' by the Polish Government in Exile in London.
