Zbigniew ‘Kim’ Kmietowicz

He first saw Izabela, the girl he would eventually marry, in the Ugandan refugee camp. They met socially years later at a party in Leeds. By coincidence, her family had also spent nearly two years in a Soviet concentration camp, and they also ended up in a refugee camp in England from where Izabela was sent to a Polish boarding school for girls.

In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported more than 1,200,000 Poles in four waves of mass deportations. In the first major operation, more than 220,000 people were sent in cattle trains to camps in northern European Russia. In the second, 320,000 were sent primarily to concentration camps in Kazakhstan, and in a third wave, another 240,000 were deported.

It has been calculated that more than 760,000 of the deportees died – a large proportion being children.

When the deportations started, Mr Kmietowicz was five. Izabela would be born a year later.

After Hitler reneged on his pact with Stalin and the Soviet Union found itself at war, Polish men of fighting age in the concentration camps were cynically given the choice of forming a division to help the war effort. Some of the volunteers and their families were sent to Iran, the men coming under British command and fighting in North Africa, Italy and eventually France.

The British allocated the wives and children of these Polish volunteers to refugee camps in India and her African colonies, and Mr Kmietowicz, with his mother and his younger brother and the family of his future wife, found themselves at one near Masindi in Uganda.

They remained there until 1948, and Poland being behind the Iron Curtain, returning home was out of the question.

The families were brought to England where many were housed in former army camps.

The Polish authorities-in-exile, realising that England was to be their new home – perhaps permanently – set up boarding schools for the boys and girls. Mr Kmietowicz was sent to the one for boys at Bottisham in Huntingdonshire, and Izabela to the girls’ primary school at Shephalbury Mansion near Stevenage.

From his school, Mr Kmietowicz got a place at Leeds University to read Economics, graduating in 1958. Meanwhile, Izabela’s father had brought his family to Bradford where he had found a job. She and Mr Kmietowicz saw each other at a graduation party being thrown by a mutual friend, and two years later they were married.

He was now working in the Operational Research Department of Guest, Keen and Nettlefold, having completed a Diploma in Economic Statistics at Manchester University.

In 1962 he left the company to take up a post as statistician with the Ugandan government, where he was responsible for the first national income and expenditure survey in rural areas.

This was to be the beginning of a lifetime interest and involvement in the development of statistics in East African nations. Additionally, it gave him and Izabela an opportunity to visit their former camp in Masindi where the only remnant of their stay there is a church and cemetery built by the Polish people.

The nearby Catholic mission keeps up the church by holding a mass there from time to time, and the couple regularly sent donations to help cover the costs of maintaining it.

Mr Kmietowicz returned to Leeds in 1964 as Lecturer in Economic Statistics in the then Department of Economics and Commerce.

Mr Kmietowicz was seconded by the university on a number of occasions so as to take up senior appointments in Africa.

His reputation saw him elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Statistical Society (1974) and to membership of the International Association for Official Statistics (1988) and the International Statistical Institute (1993).

He retired from his university post in 1995.

Mr Kmietowicz, who died just days before his 76th birthday, is survived by his wife, their daughters Helena, Ewa and Zosia, and five grandchildren.