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Veronika Piela keeps a lot of photos in her room at a seniors’ residence in Rosemont.

They hang between religious paintings and lean on desks by jewellery boxes. There’s some of her family from Ukraine, and some of her deceased Polish husband, who she met after being liberated from a German labour camp during the Second World War. There’s one of the hotel in Louiseville, near Trois-Rivières, where they worked after moving to Canada in the late 1940s — he as a cook, she as a maid.

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But one stands out from the others: a recent photo of her sitting in a chair, a blond Montreal police officer standing behind her, smiling.

“She saved my life,” Piela, 92, says in broken English.

It was two years ago, in early February, that Piela sat shivering in the back of a police car, hysterical and asking for an officer who could speak Polish or Russian.

Police had just responded to a call from someone who had found her at the corner of Lacombe and Lavoie Sts. in Côte-des-Neiges, without a coat, standing in the snow with her walker.