1928-2022

Today she would have been 96. She only died two years ago after a long and varied life, full of difficulties, and tragedy, which she overcame by sheer force of will, I think, to eventually gain happiness within her too short marriage (She was widowed just at the moment when she thought she would have some quality time with her husband!)

I met her when she was just over fifty. I thought she was so old. A year older than my own mother, to my immature mind, it seemed as if she was from a different era. Both my mother and mother-in-law had survived terrible privations during the war – my mother in Siberia, as an enemy of the people, and my mother-in-law in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp – just for being a Pole. It’s hard to say who had the worse time, but as this is about my mother =-n-law, I’ll concentrate on her.

She was at a disadvantage from the very beginning. She was born in Warsaw to a somewhat theatrical couple. Her mother wanted to be a singer, and her father, Stefan Marber, left his wife soon after baby Krysia was born. She never knew him. Her own mother never talked about him or said why he left. We can only presume that he wasn’t entirely monogamous. Money was tight; not many women worked before the war, but her mother’s friend’s father gave her a job in his law firm. This was to be a life saver in every sense. When Krystyna was rounded up during the Warsaw Uprising her distraught mother could not find a way to contact her except through the lawyer friend. Not that it helped very much at all.

She was a slave labourer in a munitions factory in Eberwalde, cold and hungry for nine months. She was eventually freed and was rescued with the White Bus initiative and sent to Sweden, where she was nursed back to health and then earned her living by dancing in a folkloric troupe through the Polish scout movement. (That’s another story. But I have the scarf she embroidered at the time to show she was part of the group “Wędrowne ptaki” The wandering birds.

After a few months she made her way back to Warsaw, to rejoin her mother and some of the friends who survived. She finished her high school education, which had been badly disrupted during the war, as no schools were allowed during the Nazi occupation, and went to University to study horticulture and food technology, where she met my father-in-law, a lecturer and future professor there. They got married, and had a child. My husband.

Now he really was the love of her life.

Here she is on a walk with a friend who had her daughter on the same day as my husband was born.

Six years later. You can see the absolute love in her eyes. I’m not quite sure what she is showing her son – at first I thought she was offering him a cigarette, but I know that’s not likely or even possible! is it a mirror?

I think it’s a gorgeous photo, anyway. I regret that I did not talk to her enough about her experiences and her life. Circumstances did not allow. I will write more in another post. But today I can only wish she was here to celebrate her 96th birthday.