Cindy’s Mother’s Story
as told by Paul (last name withheld)
to and then written by Lynne T. Attardi
Stanislawa Letkowski nee Swiatkiewicz,
Poland, post-WWII
Photo source: Paul — , 2024
A quote from the National WWII Museum
New Orleans:
Every day, memories of World War II—its sights and sounds,
its terrors and triumphs—disappear.
And then something like this occurs and we are reminded!
My friend Paul of many years suddenly told me:
“My wife Cindy, her family on her mother’s side, has some story. They are Roman Catholic. Cindy’s grandfather was with the Polish government.”
Known as the September Campaign or the Polish Campaign, the beginning of World War II supposedly began by the invasion of Poland on September 6th, 1939.
After the invasion and subsequent occupation of Poland by Germany in September of 1939, The Polish Government-in-Exile, officially known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile, was formed. This Government-in-Exile was able to exert considerable influence in Poland during World War II via its Polish Underground State and its military arm. As part of the Allies in Europe at the time, those Polish military units had escaped the occupation and fought under their own commanders. Perhaps Cindy’s maternal grandfather was working with them and also escaped.
Germany’s aim was to absorb countries’ consciousness. The Nazis wanted to make people worship their own deity, Hitler. The Nazi Party’s ultimate desire was to seize power everywhere, to install Hitler as the common dictator, to create a brand new community, one that was racially pure and loyal to their leader, the Führer himself! Hitler wanted to racially cleanse all countries to become part of his world’s conquest. And the Roman Catholic Church was high on that list and was heavily targeted by the Nazis. It needed to be Germanized.
Paul told me,
“Cindy’s family on her mother’s side were Roman Catholic.”
The Catholics were terrorized. They witnessed the execution of their priests; they watched their clergymen and nuns taken away to be imprisoned and placed in concentration camps; their churches were closed, destroyed, or set ablaze; public expression of their faith was restricted and severely punished.
Cindy told her husband Paul that her family in Poland was arrested by the Germans. Her grandfather was away when they were removed from their home. The family rumor was that their grandfather starved to death. Can we conjecture that he returned to an empty home and hid out from the Nazis? The internet claims that those who were hiding out and were caught later often were severely punished. That included execution or deportation to concentration camps.
Paul informed me that Cindy said that her mother was the tender age of 16 at the time she was placed in a concentration camp and remained a POW until she was 21 years of age. At one of these camps, Cindy’s mother witnessed her brother decapitated and then saw her mother (Cindy’s grandmother) taken away and then burned in the ovens. Paul remembers having conversations with Cindy’s mother through the most beautiful blue eyes, but they were dazed, like vacant and even lifeless at times.
It was much later, though, when WWII ended that Cindy’s mother was released and removed to a displaced person’s camp to Koblenz, Germany. Koblenz lies on the banks of the Rhine and the Moselle, a multinational tributary, and this confluence today is known as the “German Corner,” a symbol of the unification of Germany. While Koblenz might have been a peaceful looking town then and even now, during WWII it was bombed to destruction by the Germans and Cindy’s mother wanted nothing more than to get out of there and to find a permanent and safe home. She had been through hell the past five years. Did she realize where she fell in the statistics of survival?
At Koblenz, Cindy’s mother gave birth to a daughter, Teresa, who was born in October of 1946, one year or so after the end of WWII. Having a baby to take care of must have changed her view a bit on life. She wanted a happy future for her new baby.
Not too long after that, Cindy’s mother was transferred to another displaced person’s camp. My research indicated this was done for a number of reasons: overcrowded camps, health reasons, and relocation in the near future. While awaiting placement and release from this displaced person’s camp that Paul said was in the French Zone in West Germany, she met her husband-to-be, Stanislaw Letkowski. He was another displaced prisoner. Under recent traumatic war memories for both of them, love conquered their tears, and they were married. Paul’s now dear partner Cindy was born on October 5th, 1950, and was named Cecilia Stanislawa. That’s according to the records at the archives of the displaced prisoners camp of Bad Arolsen in the town of Bad Kreuznach, a U.S. Army camp. Cindy’s number was 153-428. She was one year old when, along with her mother, father Stanislaw Letkowski, and sister Teresa, entered the Unted States by ship.
Paul and Cindy were married on May 24, 1980. Years later, Paul’s uncle Vincent — a U.S. Army Big Red 1, who happened to have landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day and fought throughout Europe for our country during WWII – had a conversation with Cindy’s mother, Stanislawa Letkowski nee Swiatkiewic. Later, he approached Paul and surprised him with this information he just gathered from Paul’s mother-in-law:
“My unit liberated your mother’s camp at Hirzenhaim in March of 1945.”
Paul did more research and discovered from his mother-in-law’s obit that she was first held at the Auschwitz Work Camp, then transferred to the Fordon Camp, and, lastly, she was imprisoned at the Hirzenhain camp until her liberation in March 1945.
In September 1939, after the Germans invaded Poland triggering WWII, Auschwitz I, once an army barracks, was converted into the infamous prisoner-of-war camp. Hitler wanted Polish leadership and intelligentsia destroyed, and in 1940 the Auschwitz camp was at first established for Polish political prisoners. We know from Cindy about the connection her grandfather had to the Polish Government, possibly thereby leading Cindy’s family to the misfortune of being taken directly to Auschwitz. It was there that for even the most trivial of reasons, the inmates were beaten, tortured, and executed. Somehow, Cindy’s mother survived Auschwitz and later was transferred to the Fordon Camp.
I wanted information about Fordon Camp. Wikipedia showed it was originally a town in Germany belonging to the Grand Duchy of Posen and under the direct control of Prussia. At the end of WWI, it was returned to Poland. When the Nazis took control of Fordon in 1939, historians estimated that during the war, they killed from 1200 to 3000 people there, mainly Poles and Jews. At the risk of offending your sensibilities, you can research the camp called the Death Valley of Fordon by searching for “The Valley of Death, Bydgoszcz” to get more information. I must warn you that the information is disturbing.
However, I went further and researched more, and, somehow, and, fortunately for her, I’ll say, Cindy’s mother was able to survive now at the Hirzenhain camp, 45 km northeast of Frankfurt am Main, which was a forced labor camp operated by the Gestapo. So, I asked Paul about that, and his reply was interesting to me:
“Her mother knew how to sew and so that kept her alive, to sew German uniforms. If you had something that the Germans could use, you lived.”
As a sewist, my curiosity was intrigued about this, so I found a site that claimed “mutual assistance groups” were formed by like women incarcerated in the concentration camps. Having come from the same area of invasion, some women shared the same type or level of education and even family ties. Women survived merely by assisting SS camp authorities by repairing their clothing, cooking for them, doing their laundry, and even housecleaning. They were needed. See: Women during the Holocaust | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org) Other sites talked about women using their sexuality to stay alive: placing that last spec of rouge on the obvious cheek to look pretty; that family heirloom clutched in her hand when arrested now placed purposefully in a conspicuous place of her sparkling clean hair with all lice removed; and a remarkably clean and odorless body thanks to freezing water in a disgusting bathing tub and faucet. Perhaps if you were attractive and stood out from the rest, you were favored by one or more guards and were kept around for repeated attention.
This last camp at which she was held, Hirzenhain, was located near Hesse, Germany. It was active from 1943 to 1945. Prisoners of war were contained there but so were convicted criminals who performed forced labor. A couple internet sites talked about an atrocious event that took place on March 25th, 1945, the day Cindy’s mother was liberated near the end of the war, when SS troops killed 87 inmates within the camp. Her mother was fortunate to have “escaped” this mass murder. You’ll have to go online to read about it in depth. But, in short, I continued reading, and fortunately for Cindy’s mother, and how unfortunate for these prisoners (quote from Wikipedia, Public Domain), here goes:
On the afternoon of March 25, Wrede and the Gestapo camp administration selected two groups from the remaining AEL prisoners from the 49 Frankfurt prisoners, according to the files, who were supposed to be transferred to the Büdingen employment office the next morning. That same afternoon, a group of male prisoners, under the supervision of the SS men of the advance detachment, dug a pit about 800 m from the camp. When asked by an overseer about the size of the pit, SS-Hauptscharführer Fritsch explained: “This will be a gasoline depot.” He will also take care of the release transport to Büdingen, which is otherwise accompanied by the guards, with his men. The work did not go unnoticed by the population.
The two groups, the women from the Frankfurt Gestapo camp first, and after five o’clock the prisoners selected from the camp, presumably unable to march, were led out of the camp by SS men in the direction of Glashütten. The groups waited in the forest while two prisoners were each dragged out of the forest and pushed into the pit dug especially for this purpose in the afternoon. There, Emil Fritsch and young ethnic German SS men shot at the prisoners with submachine guns. Wrede later reported to his superior Trummler when he arrived: “The matter with the Russian women is settled.” 81 women and six men were murdered.
So, the story goes, Cindy’s mother was liberated from the last camp at which she was held, Hirzenhain, when WWII came to an end. Cindy’s Mother and Father met each other at the displaced person’s camp in the French Zone of West Germany, Koblenz, and, yes, that’s where Cindy was born. Many years later, in the United States, Cindy met and married Paul, and not known to them, Paul’s uncle Vincent, during WWII, while a member of a WWII troop, liberated Cindy’s grandmother!