Krystyna Kalata-Olejnik, born in 1939

I never found my family

I was born in Warsaw, but my autobiography actually begins the moment I stepped out of a sewer canal onto the Aryan side during the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Sister Julia Sosnowska, no longer alive today, a nun from a nearby order on Nowolipie Street, was passing by near the canal. She spotted a little girl with dark hair and helped her get out of the sewer. And that, indeed, was me. She decided to help me and traveled with me to the children’s home in Gnaców near Mińsk Mazowiecki. In precisely this home, where I was being hidden, I stayed until the end of the war. I supposedly had a small slip of paper with the name: Krystyna Olejnik, age 4. I stayed there until October 1945.

From there, on the recommendation of the nuns from the emergency shelter at 75 Nowogrodzka Street, I was transferred to Katowice to be adopted. Because they could not find a suitable family for me in Katowice, I was placed in a Caritas home run by Father Markefka in Katowice-Bogucice. I stayed in this home until March 19, 1946, when a very patriotic childless couple from Siemianowice Śląskie, Maria and Alojzy Bula, decided to take me out of the children’s home and adopt me. Because I had no birth certificate, they never legally adopted me, but, nonetheless, they brought me up, as long as they were alive.

Caritas is a Catholic charitable organization active in Poland.
Siemianowice Śląskie – located in Śląsk (Silesia), southwestern Poland.

My adopted father had participated in three Silesian uprisings. In the third uprising, he had lost a leg. Before the war, Mr. Bula was a civil servant. When the Second World War broke out, both of them were left without any means of support. They were thrown out of the apartment they had occupied, they were harassed, and they were put on list no. 5. Mr. Bula, during the war, made a vow to God that if, after the war, Silesia were to become Polish again, then he would take in an orphan to bring up. Thus, he did as he had resolved. This honor fell to me.

Silesian uprisings – uprisings of Polish inhabitants of Silesia to protest annexation to Germany.
List no. 5 – in Silesia, Germans introduced four privileged ethnic groups (two for Germans, two for Silesians). Those who either didn’t fit the ethnic requirements or did not want to be categorized in those four groups (including those who considered themselves Polish) were put on list no. 5.

In 1946, I began to attend the elementary school in Siemianowice, which I completed in 1953. In the meantime, in 1951, my adopted father died of a heart attack. My adopted mother, already an elderly person, born in 1895, received neither work nor support payments for me. We lived on 232 złoty from her widow’s pension.

In 1954, I took a job as messenger in the local steelworks named Jedność (Unity). In 1960, I transferred to a job, in the same steelworks, as a gantry operator, from which, in 1981, I retired on a disability pension of the third group. I have ailing, swollen legs.

In 1960, I married a Pole. In 1962, I gave birth to my daughter, Beata, and in 1964, to my son, Krzysztof. They are both married and have their own families. After several accidents in the army and in the mines, my husband became ill with schizophrenia and, since 1976, receives a disability pension of the second group. I was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit for my many years of work in the steelworks Jedność. I never found my own family again.

Siemianowice, February 26, 1992