Town Crier Articles

Unfortunately, crime is on the rise right here in our community. We have all received emails from Chesapeake Bay Management to safeguard our homes by locking doors to our homes and vehicles. Well, if you are not doing this, then perhaps now is the time to begin doing so.

 

At the end of June and mid-July there were three incidents of theft and vandalism right here in New Town. These occurred on Casey Boulevard and Center Street.

 

You can sign up for free at  www.neighborhoodalerts.com to receive Neighborhood Alerts after the incidents are reported to the police and police have been dispatched to the scene. While this is after the fact it is a resource to see where things are happening in our back yard, or in our front yards!

 

You’ll need to enter your address and select the types of alerts you want to receive by email. Alerts can include crime alerts, but also missing pet and weather alerts, even building permit alerts. Be sure to deselect any alerts you do not wish to receive. You can see the crime report once you receive an email from Neighborhood Alerts, and you can update your preferences or unsubscribe anytime from the email you receive. (James City County also offers an alert system: www.jccalert.org for emergency notification of flooding, weather or other emergencies in our area.)

 

According to James City County’s Crime Prevention website’s FAQ section, to Report a crime in progress call 757-566-0112 or 911 if an emergency, never via email or social media. For a crime not in progress, call the James City County Police Department at 757-566-0112 to speak with an officer.

 

Remember, common sense crime prevention includes being aware of your surroundings, securing your property, and trusting your instincts. If you have an alarm system and cameras, be sure to use them. Simple actions like locking doors and windows, being cautious of strangers, and reporting suspicious activity can significantly reduce your risk of becoming a victim. 

Have you ever wondered how James City County operates and how policies made by its Board of Supervisors, often affecting all of us, are implemented? From decisions about filling potholes to policies governing building new housing developments or solar facilities and much, much more, it is County Administrator and New Town resident Scott Stevens who plays a critical role in getting all this accomplished.

 

Please join us on August 21 at 12:00 at the NTRA meeting space to learn more about how Scott serves James City County and his job’s challenges and joys. Feel free to bring your questions and even complaints are welcome.  

     

If you choose, bring your bag lunch, and we will provide water, and cookies.

             

Place:  NTRA Meeting Room, 5118 Center Street

Time:  Thursday, August 21 at 12:00.

 

And look for more information in September and October about other upcoming Noontime talks, including a view of Greenspring Trail by Paul Griswold, Photographer and Naturalist, and Jack Espinal talking about bats just in time for the Halloween season!

 

On June 5 and June 27, during talks at the NTRA meeting space, Williamsburg resident Grace Konar (Konarkowski) and New Town resident Aneta Leska spoke about their lives in Poland. They captivated their audiences with vivid family stories. At the first talk, drawing on her parents and grandparents’ memories, Grace described the impact of the German invasion of Poland and the Holocaust on her family, including her father and mothers-in-law’s experience in concentration camps. 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, complementing their stories.  

 

 

On June 27, Grace and Aneta spoke of how the Soviet Union imposed communism on Poland and how that control affected the lives of the Polish people.  The Polish Communist Party sought control of all aspects of government, economy and society. Under communism, Poles often experienced significant food shortages and limited access go consumer items.  To maintain  control  and suppress dissent, the regime had a widespread surveillance system to monitor what people were doing or saying. Opposition could lead to arrest and imprisonment

 

Grace remembered the propaganda expounded by government-owned newspapers, radio and later television stations, as well as how that propaganda shaped school curriculum.  From fifth grade on, all students studied Russian and there was constant veneration of the Soviet Union. Everyone was expected to vote, but there were no free elections. She recalled that the same Communist candidates constantly appeared on the ballot and there were consequences for failing to vote or for failing to attend the compulsory May Day parade.   

 

Both Grace and Aneta experienced the fears associated with living in a totalitarian nation. Seeking to hear the truth, Grace’s grandfather held the radio up to his ear when surreptitiously listening  to Radio Free Europe, which was illegal. She spoke of the constant surveillance as authorities listened to phone calls and opened mail, and the secret police monitored people’s activities, including her church youth group. Its popular priest was suspected of inculcating anti-government ideas. Students, including a frightened Grace, were interrogated at school by the secret police for evidence of subversion and the priest ultimately disappeared. 

 

Aneta, who is a generation younger than Grace, recalled how sugar, meat and milk were rationed and that during the food crisis of the 1980s, her mother brought her on smuggling trips to other Eastern bloc countries, during which they carried food and consumer items back to Poland. She remembered her intense fear of being caught.  As a child, Aneta was aware that her extended family included a member of the secret police and she shared her memory of standing on her family’s apartment balcony with her father as he pointed out the apartments of neighbors, who were government informers, who were reporting on his activities.

 

 

New Towners in the audience were captivated and moved by Grace’s account of her family’s escape from Gdansk, in the northern part of Poland. In 1974, her husband, Mike, who was studying to become a naval engineer, spent a summer in Sweden as an exchange student- worker in a shipyard, where he experienced the differences between east and west, especially greater freedom and a much higher standard of living.  Grace relayed how he came home  determined to escape. With a chuckle, she confessed that “it was all Mike; he was the one who wanted to leave.” Three years later, based on his exchange experience, Mike was allowed to take a short trip back to Sweden. But he left without Grace and their baby, Matthew, a government requirement to guarantee his return.  With directions from earlier escapees, Mike managed to get to West Germany, which welcomed him and assisted him in his immigration application as a refugee to the U.S.

 

Getting Grace and Matthew out of Poland took a lot of money and connections with the passport office, both of which were provided by  Grace’s Uncle Helmet, a ship captain.  Grace spoke with emotion as she declared that her family remains deeply indebted to Helmet for his critical assistance, given despite the danger it entailed.  But all did not go as planned.  Just before their departure date, toddler Matthew’s passport was cancelled.  Her uncle urged her to stick to their plans and leave her child with a relative.  Fearful of calling in advance and exposing her escape plans, she immediately rushed to the train station and hours later arrived at her mother-law, Balbina’s doorstep to drop off Matthew.   

 

Grace did not see her young son or have any direct communication with him for 15 months. Still emotional about this separation 50 years later, Grace said “I cried every night for 15 months.” Frantic, the family went without avail for help to the West German government and the Red Cross.

 

Grace’s uncle obtained approval for Matthew to travel to Sweden, but it was on the condition that Grace and Mike, who were then in West Germany, could prove they had permanent residency in Sweden. As a last hope, Grace’s mother, Janina, went to the Swedish Consul’s office in Warsaw, prepared to lie. While waiting, she began crying from the stress and a sympathetic Swedish staff member, upon hearing about Matthew’s plight, advised Janina to tell the truth and the sympathetic Consul authorized the necessary Swedish documents.   

 

In 1978, the Konarkowski family was reunited on a German dock, but only after yet more moments of sheer panic as little Matthew was initially refused admittance by German officials. Shortly afterwards they flew to New York City, almost penniless. Grace recounted how they had been given two telephone numbers by Polish friends, one of which connected them with a Russian Columbia University professor, who generously offered housing and helped Mike write his resume and apply for jobs. To this day, they remain grateful to this professor whose assistance helped facilitate the family’s move to Virginia, where Mike obtained a professional position and the family prospered, became citizens, and had two more children.

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

(Rain date is Sunday, August 24)

 

 

 

 New Town just made it happen!

• Approximately 85 New Town households contributed by leaving food donations on their porches the second Saturday of each month for the past 12 months.

• Donations were then loaded onto trucks/vans from local hunger relief organizations for distribution to at-risk families.

Total donations (in pounds) by neighborhood for the period July 2024 – June 2025:

 

Abbey Commons	1,494
Charlotte Park	4,543
Chelsea Green	441
Savannah Square	586
Shirley Park	1,857
Village Walk	1,087
Center Street Condos	180 (4 months)
Total all neighborhoods	10,188

 

Many thanks to all the households who contributed this past year and a special thanks to the volunteers who helped made it an easy process. New Town’s PORCH volunteers who assist on a regular basis include Judy Byrnes, Tricia Byrne, Kathy Casey, Holly Demster, Gayle Duncan, Liz Fones-Wolf, Bob Glenn, Eden Glenn, Lynn Griswold, Paul Griswold, Daisy Henna, Bob Hyatt, Gale Hyatt, Joanne Kramer, Diane Langhorst, Angela Lesnett, Fred Lesnett, Diane Malinowski, Anouk Mapp, Ellen Morgan, John Morgan, Rick Richards, Ellen Weidman, Tim Weidman, and Sommer Wrona.

 

These monthly food drives are conducted under the umbrella of PORCH Communities, a grassroots, all volunteer organization established in 2010 and headquartered in Chapel Hill, NC.  Presently, there are 550 neighborhood chapters in 10 states. PORCH Communities Williamsburg was the first chapter in Virginia. New Town is one of 10 neighborhoods participating in the Williamsburg chapter. 

 

Here's a recent news artlcle about how the Williamsburg area PORCH communities are responding to the food insecurity need and how appreciative the pantries that receive PORCH food are.  https://wydaily.com/latest/local/2025/06/09/new-food-pantry-donation-program-in-williamsburg-makes-it-easy-to-give-back/

 

Monthly food drives are on-going.  Starting this month, New Town will be collecting donations on a rotating basis for Williamsburg House of Mercy, FISH, and Grove Christian Outreach Center.  If you would like more information or would like to volunteer, please contact either Gale Hyatt (ladyhappy73@gmail.com) or Eden Glenn (edenaglenn@gmail.com.)

 

 

 

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.

                                                                   

 

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.

 

   

 

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.

We play using a light ball on Mondays (rain date Wednesdays) between 6:00 and 7:30.  Everyone, who is at the pool, from older kids to seniors, is invited to play and no experience or swimming skills are necessary.  Feel free to play regularly or occasionally.  Come and join the fun!  

   

Any questions, contact, Liz Fones-Wolf at efwolf@wvu.edu.