On June 5th and June 27th, Williamsburg resident Grace Konar (Konarkowski) and New Town resident Aneta Leska, who has worked at William and Mary's Global Research Institute, spoke about their lives in Poland. They captivated their New Town audiences with vivid family stories, with Grace at the first talk drawing on her parents and grandparents memories to talk the German invasion of Poland and the Holocaust. At the second talk, both Grace and Aneta shared stories from their own memories of state surveillance, escape and resistance in postwar Communist Poland. Family photos and documents from the concentration camp archives provided vivid images, complimenting their stories.
This is Part 1 of a series about their talks.
The Konarkoski's Family Experience in World War II
On June 5, Grace Konar described the impact of the war on her mother’s family, who lived in Warsaw. With the German invasion of Poland in 1939, her grandfather, Leopold Grzechni, was mobilized to fight, was captured and then disappeared, possibly having been sent to France as a slave laborer. At the end of the war six years later, he returned by ship to Gdansk, a northern port city, too weak to be sent home to Warsaw.
Her mother, Janina, and her siblings, all young adults, were among the three million Poles deported to Germany as forced laborers to toil on farms and factories. Her grandmother, Stefania, and her youngest child remained in occupied Warsaw. With food in desperately short supply, Stefania told Grace stories of how she engaged in the dangerous practice of smuggling food from the countryside, which carried the penalty of death. Stefania survived 1944 Polish resistance uprising, which the Germans brutally repressed, killing more than 200,000 Poles. Amazingly, Stefania and her children all survived the war and after regaining contact with Leopold settled in Gdansk. Scarred by the violent separation of her family, for years she insisted that all her children, their spouses and grandchildren live together. Grace lived in this large household with seven cousins.
Drawing on remembered conversations with her husband’s parents, Balbina Marcinak (maiden name) and Czeslaw (Iga) Konarkowski, Grace described Balbina's activities with the Polish resistance. In 1943, Balbina was captured, tortured, and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where the number 45917 was tattooed on her arm. Iga, a Polish soldier, was captured shortly after Germany invaded and initially held in a POW camp in Germany.
Both ended up in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria, where men and women were separated. Conditions in the camps were horrendous; random beatings and killings, back-breaking work, constant hunger, no coats or gloves during the winter and no other belongings aside from a thin blanket and a bowl or cup. Grace passed around the audience the small metal cup that Iga used at Mauthausen and also spoke of the notorious quarry, where for a short time Inga helped carry giant slabs of granite up 186 steps. (See photos of Mauthausen below.) However, Iga’s fluent German, his skills as a musician and in Grace’s words “his beautiful Gothic German handwriting” mostly protected him from such brutal work.
In early May 1945, in the midst of the confusion associated with the U.S. Army’s liberation of Mauthausen, Balbina and Iga met on the grounds of the camp and three weeks later married and made their way back to western part of Poland. Balbina gave birth to Michal (Mike) Konarkowski, who at the age of fourteen met Grace at a youth camp. They both went to university in Gdansk, where they subsequently married. Grace and Mike believed that his parents suffered from PTSD, with Iga always nervous and afraid that the Germans would invade again. Balbina was obsessed with hunger and never would throw away any food, even stale bread.
(Above: Iga and Balbina, 1939)
As time for the talk ran out, at the audience’s urging, Grace agreed to finish her story at a second talk later in June. After the session ended, residents gathered around Grace to ask more questions. Among them was New Town resident Aneta Leska. Although there is a tiny group of Polish immigrants living in Williamsburg, Aneta, who is a generation younger than Grace, had never met her. As fate would have it, Aneta was born in Poland in 1978, the very year that Grace and Mike emigrated, and her family was part of the Polish democracy movement led by Solidarity that ended Communism in 1989. Aneta readily agreed to provide insights from her family’s perspective at the next talk.
Look for Part 2 of the families' stories in the August Town Crier.