Narrative
Jadwiga Gałązka’s Trail of Miracles
Jadwiga Gałązka was born in Born 1941. She has no memory of the war, and so her story is not of it; rather how it altered and changed her life forever. This is a story of discovery of identity, family roots, and personal history.
During World War II being Jewish families (like Jadwiga’s) were in extreme danger. In 1942, when she was only one and a half years old her parents smuggled her out of the Pińczów ghetto and had to leave her on a road in a nearby town. There a Polish man found her and found her a new family. She remained in the same town until the age of five and moved to Polish territories regained from Germany after the war. There her mother began seeing a kind man who helped Jadwiga with her education and care. Unfortunately, the family moved again and he did not come with them. They moved many more times. Throughout this time, she attended school for seven years then, and when she stopped her academical studies, her mother believed that Jadwiga no longer deserved food and a roof over her head for free and made Jadwiga work to stay.
Unfortunately during this time her mother began spending time drunk and often resulted in abuse in many different ways to poor Jadwiga. Throughout her childhood, her mother had often called her a ‘Jewess’, which she had considered a great insult. One of Jadwiga’s most painful memories was when she had tried to hug her mother, but was pushed away. Her mother said to her, “Do not hug me child. You are not mine, you are a filthy Jewess.” Thus, at this point, Jadwiga realized that this woman could not be her true, loving mother but, with no place to go, she continued to live with her mother for many more years. At the age of sixteen she finally ran away with one of her stepmother’s boyfriends. She lived with him and his family in a tiny, crowded house. She worked for them, doing unwanted jobs like cleaning, cooking, and taking out the trash in exchange for food and a place to sleep. Then she became close friends with the elderly lady who lived next door. It was this lady who told her about an organization that helps Jews with a place to live and other living necessities.
Jadwiga went to the organization without any documents or proof as to what she told them about herself and her past. They then helped her by placing her with a Jewish family, gave her some pocket money, a job, and signed her up for night school. From then she went on to live her life as an independent person but still knew very little about her history and family roots.
Jadwiga didn't really know much about her past. She did not have any records or evidence of her family and was, at this point in her life, busy with raising two children as a single mother. She also never really had expected to find anything, about her biological family, but at the age of 55 her curiosity started to increase, and she and her friends, travelled to the town where she had been found and taken in by the family who had raised her . She had vague memories of a church there, and knew that it was were she had been baptised.Since the church would keep records of baptisms, she and her friends went to there to find the church but it closed. Jadwiga, undeterred, went up to a house just beside the church. She knew the last name of the people who had taken her in, so she asked a woman what house the people with that last name lived. The woman said that there were many families in that town with that last name, and she began pointing to each house that had a family with that name. One of the houses she pointed to was the one right across from the church which Jadwiga recognized immediately.
She went over to the house and began talking to the man living there. When she began to explain to him that she used to live there, the man immediately recognized her. The man who had found Jadwiga had died a month earlier but she could still contact with the brother of the man who had found her. The man took Jadwiga and her friends by car to the place where his brother had first found her. He told Jadwiga that when they had found her she had stood there and said that her mother had and aunt had cried and cried when they left her. He also suggested Jadwiga to ask his nephew questions since he may have known more information. He also mentioned that someone had been looking for her, from Israel. This last piece of news was shocking to her, and made her feel hope of finding her real family. Therefore, Jadwiga, along with her friends, immediately set off to see the nephew.
Upon their arrival, the nephew welcomed them and brought them into his home. He produced some pictures that his father had kept from when Jadwiga was little. He also gave her an envelope addressed from Israel. This letter was possibly from someone from her family which offered further proof that her family might have been looking for her. The envelope was addressed from the year 1968. There was also a letter that his father had written; it included her parents and grandparents names as well as her name, Klara Gross. In this moment she truly discovered a part of who she truly was. She was Klara Gross. As Jadwiga and her friends prepared to leave the nephew, he said that his father had always regretted losing contact with her.
With all this information about herself and her past, Jadwiga was able to enrol into the Jewish Historical Institute, an organization dedicated to reuniting people with their families or telling them of their past. She had always felt alone and confused by who she was, but now she was amongst people who had gone through similar experiences, who understood what she had gone through. She was given a document proving her as a Child of the Holocaust. Jadwiga understood this as, she as one of them, meaning that she was no longer alone, that she and others could understand what she had gone through.
Eventually she wrote a letter to Israel to the address on the envelope, but the letter returned. She contacted the Jewish Historical Institute and with its help she began looking for her family. Finally they contacted her family in Israel, but through some misunderstanding she was told that none of her family had survived. Although she was told this, she still wanted to find more. So, three years later, she contacted the Institute again. The man there even recognized the letter that she was using as a guide since it was her only current lead towards her family. The man took her to the archives and there they were able to find her file. In the file it said that her aunt had indeed died, but her cousin was still alive. She contacted the cousin whose name was Sonya. Sonya asked for a picture of Jadwiga from when she was little to verify her identity. Jadwiga complied and sent the same picture her cousin had. They tried to talk on the phone but there was a complication because Sonya did not speak Polish and Jadwiga knew very little English. Thus, they used a translating dictionary and were able to communicate though with some difficulty.
One Christmas Jadwiga received a call from someone who said that she loved her very much and called her little Klarica (which was her real name). This was her other aunt, who tearfully apologized for their lost time. Jadwiga later went to visit Sonya in Israel. She had an emotional reunion at the airport and had an interview which aired on Israeli television. Sonya told her that she had lived in Gdańsk with her parents, Jadwiga’s parents, and Jadwiga in one house. She also told Jadwiga that her father was a lawyer. With two new leads to follow Jadwiga returned to Poland and contacted a historian in Gdańsk.
In the meantime, a man called Jadwiga saying that he had seen the televised interview in Israel and that he had known her mother. This encouraged Jadwiga because she was constantly finding small miracles that helped her learn about herself and her family.
The historian from Gdańsk looked through some of the archives and found two binders filled with Jadwiga’s father’s papers. The papers included old cases, personal documents, and her father’s CV so she could learn more about him and where he had studied in Germany. The fact that Jadwiga still didn’t have any pictures of her parents continually haunted her. Therefore, 5 years ago, she asked her daughter in law, who spoke German, to write to the schools where her father had studied, asking if they had any pictures of him. Sometime later one of the schools sent Jadwiga her father’s old library card which had a picture of him on it. This was a huge new discovery for Jadwiga because she finally had a face to her father’s name.
Two years ago her daughter was searching for something on the internet when she came across a book titled The History of Jews in Gdańsk. She ordered the book as a surprise and gave it to her mother on her next name day. At the end of the book there was a part dedicated to Jadwiga’s grandfather and how he survived the war. In 1943, he was sent from a concentration camp in Germany to Switzerland. It was also written that he was the only one who had survived out of 150 people who were deported. He lived through the war and died eventually at the age 83 thinking that all his family had died. However, his little granddaughter, Jawiga, had lived.
With this new information she began a new search in Switzerland. Jadwiga found someone in the Red Cross who advised them to search through medical records. This search provided more information and some files belonging to Jadwiga’s father. They found that in one form he had written down the names and birthdays of both of Jadwiga’s parents. He had also written down her full name and real birthday. Last year she celebrated her actual birthday date for the first time in her life .
In the meantime, she had also done an interview for the magazine Newsweek and had a journalist write back to her after some time. The journalist told jadwiga that he had received two emails that he had been asked to pass on to her. One was from a woman who had known her family when they had lived in Gdańsk; she had been one of their neighbours, and still remembered little Klara and wanted to contact her. The second email was from the son of the man who had found her. He now lived in Berlin and had stumbled upon the article by complete accident. He wrote that he didn’t want to lose contact with her like his father.
Jadwiga contacted the woman from the first email. The woman asked her if Jadwiga knew what her parents had done as a profession. She told her that she knew that her father was a lawyer, but that she did not know what her mother had done. After some time the woman sent her a photocopy of one of her mother’s paintings. The original was still in Pińczów and Jadwiga is going to try to get it but the man who has it now has no intention of selling it. He even turned down an offer to sell it to a museum. Jadwiga is being asked by many schools to visit and tell her story and in some time, she will be visiting a school in Pińczów where she is planning on meeting the man face to face and trying to convince him to sell her mother’s painting to her. She desperately wants something of her mother’s so that she can have a connection to her. She also hopes to ask the woman from Gdansk to look if maybe she can find some more of her mother’s paintings. Maybe there are some in her attic or somewhere else that they might have been forgotten.
Jadwiga’s grandson is in high school now and has entered a writing contest sponsored by a Jewish foundation. The contest is to write a story about something that occurred during the Second World War. He is proudly writing the story of his grandmother, Jadwiga Gałązka’s also known as Klara Gross. Throughout much difficulty and uncertainty, Jadwiga was able to truly rediscover who she was. But her story cries out with many more stories of loss and pain. Although the war ‘ended’ it continues to affect the lives of thousands. This great global conflict not only took lives, but took identities, and with the millions dead, as result of this war, and the thousands who don’t know who they or their family are everyone was truly a victim of this dark chapter of human events.