Krystyna Wituska (1920–1944)

Krystyna Wituska was born on 12 May 1920, just two years after Poland regained its independence. She was born in the village of Jeżew near Łódź to a wealthy family who had lived there for over 200 years. Her parents, Feliks and Maria, née Orzechowska, were landowners in Jeżew and Kłoniszew, where they ran a modern farm with fields, a fruit farm and hundreds of breeding animals. In 1938, Feliks Wituski founded a school for the children of the farm labourers who worked in his fields. Krystyna’s parents’ marriage was primarily one of convenience. The two families urged the couple to marry as an eleventh-hour emergency measure, although ultimately, it was the dowry offered by Feliks to the parents of the bride that decided the matter. 

Krystyna enjoyed an idyllic childhood. During the warm months, she spent the days outdoors with her sister Halina, who was a year older, and their father taught them about the wonders of nature. The children spent much of their time in their own enclosure, with canaries, deer and other animals. Both girls enjoyed a comprehensive education right from the start, which included lessons in French by a Swiss governess. A year later, they attended a private school in Łódź. At ten, Krystyna and her older sister were sent to the Catholic convent school of the Ursulines in Poznań, an institution with a good reputation and strict rules. Five years later, they both continued their school education in Warsaw, at the Queen Hedwig grammar school (Gimnazjum Królowej Jadwigi). Since Krystyna’s health worsened rapidly due to her weak lungs, she was sent by her parents first to Zakopane and then to the spa town of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Shortly before her departure, Wituska secretly became engaged to Zbigniew Walc. The parents of both young sweethearts were against the relationship, calling it “childish”. However, there followed an intensive exchange of letters between the two after they were separated from each other. They wrote to each other every two or three days (some of these letters survived the chaos of war and were found hidden away in the fireplace of the family home in Jeżew – author’s note). 

In the summer of 1939, Krystyna Wituska returned to Jeżew from Switzerland, against the wishes of her parents. The mood in Poland was tense, and there was much talk of the looming war. However, the imminent threat was not yet being fully felt. After the war broke out, everything changed for the Wituski family. Their property was seized by the Nazis and they were forced to leave their land. Ownership of their lands was handed over to a German, who was an ardent supporter of the Nazi ideology. Feliks Wituski found work near Łowicz. His wife Maria went to live in Warsaw with Krystyna, who found a place to live in a shop belonging to relatives in the district of Mokotów. In her free time, she learned German. Probably in the autumn of 1941, Krystyna joined the underground “Union for Armed Struggle” (Związek Walki Zbrojnej) and later the Home Army. She chose the codename “Kasia” and was involved in the spy network that monitored the airport at Okęcie. Later, she worked for the group in the coffee houses in Warsaw, flirting with Wehrmacht soldiers to find out the names of their superiors and gather information about the German troops. After almost having her cover blown on at least two occasions, she withdrew for a short while, before being persuaded to return to work against the German occupiers by her superiors in the group, who were eager not to lose her. 

On 19 October 1942, Wituska was arrested. Her fiancé, Zbigniew Walc, codename “Nik”, had already been arrested in Neubrandenburg in Germany in June, where he was held prisoner as a forced labourer. He also worked for the Polish secret services, among other things providing information about the number of forced labourers in the Third Reich and the mood among them. While looking through Walc’s belongings, the Gestapo found letters from Krystyna. At that time, the Gestapo had been attempting to extinguish the network of agents in Germany for months, and were systematically checking all contacts of whom they had been made aware. Finally, the Gestapo also turned up at the place where Wituska lived in Warsaw. While searching the apartment, documents were discovered that revealed Krystyna to be a member of the underground group. Among other items, the Gestapo found a notebook containing the addresses of two women who worked with her. Maria Kacprzyk and Wanda Kamińska were arrested the following day and were taken with Krystyna to the Pawiak, the largest German prison in occupied Poland. There, after the three were interrogated together multiple times, they were taken to the Gestapo prison on Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Zbigniew Walc was also being held in the Gestapo prison, and the couple succeeded in seeing each other twice during their incarceration. According to the police records, the women, who were accused of espionage, were taken to Moabit prison in February 1943. They were held there prior to their trial before the Reichskriegsgericht, the highest military court. Only high-profile cases were tried before this tribunal, such as people accused of espionage and other activities on behalf of the enemy. More than 500 Poles were brought before this court in total, of whom around 180 were sentenced to death. 

The main proceedings against the accused Polish women were held on 19 April 1943 in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Wanda Kamińska was sentenced to three years’ hard labour with harsh conditions of detention. Maria Kacprzyk was sentenced to eight years’ hard labour. Krystyna Wituska was the only one of the three to be sentenced to death for “espionage, assisting the enemy and making preparations for high treason”. The decision to impose the highest penalty was made after Wituska pleaded guilty to her underground activities, while the other two women pursued other defence strategies. They claimed before the court that they were still in training as secret service agents, and that they had therefore not had access to any important information. Krystyna made a conscious decision not to follow a similar line of defence, assuming that the court would not believe these claims. After hearing the mild punishments meted out to Kacprzyk and Kamińska, she made an attempt to change the course of her fate. However, her efforts were in vain: Adolf Hitler, to whom she had addressed her request for clemency, rejected her appeal. 

After her verdict was made final, Wituska was again taken to the prison in Moabit, where she awaited her execution with Maria Kasprzycka and Lena Dobrzyska in cell no. 18. Wanda Kamińska was placed in a different cell. Then, in August 1943, a regular exchange of letters began between the three prisoners in cell 18 and 16-year-old Helga Grimpe, the daughter of the prison guard Hedwig Grimpe. Helga was impressed by the solidarity among the women in the cell, by their conviviality and their reconciliation with their fate. She dubbed them “the clover leaf”. She also procured medicines, cigarettes and apples for them, which were passed on to the women by her mother. Helga’s letters were flushed down the toilet by the three prisoners immediately after they had read them. Helga, however, carefully stored away the messages she received from them in return. They contained requests for certain items, but above all words of gratitude for her help. Helga’s mother Hedwig, a warder in the prison, was called “sunshine” by the young women. 60 years later, the bundle of letters became the basis for the book by Simone Trieder and Lars Skowronski, “Zelle Nr. 18 – eine Geschichte von Mut und Freundschaft” (“Cell No. 18 – a Story of Courage and Friendship”), a report on the story of an unusual friendship between three Polish women prisoners and the young daughter of a warder. Today, the letters can be found in the archive of the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (the Institute for National Remembrance).

Krystyna’s letters to her parents and sister also survived the war. In them, she talks about the joy of small things: of spring, the twittering of birds and being able to wash her hair. Wituska submitted to her fate. She didn’t complain, although she certainly longed for freedom and her family. In her letter to her parents dated 9 May 1943, she writes: 

“Dear parents! I hope that the censors won’t mind that I’m writing these final letters home in Polish. I have already received your loving and touching letters. Of course, I had to cry a bit when I read them, because I feel so sorry for you and constantly reproach myself for giving you so little joy and being only a cause of constant worry. But I breathed a sigh of relief when I read that you’re not feeling desperate, and that you haven’t given up hope. (...) I feel wonderful, and I am full of joy, which is why I sometimes have a bad conscience, because I am confronted with the thought that you are worried over there, or thinking goodness knows what, while I’m having such a good time here. There are now three of us here, and we all have the same problems. (...) You can’t imagine how good it feels to be among young people again and to be able to have really good talks with each other. I almost never think about what awaits me, since we simply don’t have time for reflection. We sing and crack jokes the whole day long, almost like silly schoolgirls. By the way, we feel as though we’re at school here, or at boarding school, because there are so many things that aren’t allowed, and we worry that we might get told off. (...) Keep your head held high, dear Mummy, and don’t worry about me, my one and only Daddy. It’s not for nothing that I’m your daughter, and I can bravely bear any fate and any misfortune.”[1]

In August 1943, Wituska gave a witness statement in the trial against Zbigniew Walc. That was the last time they saw each other. Walc was finally given a mild sentence: one year in prison, whereby the six months already served were taken into account. However, after serving his prison sentence, he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp by the Gestapo, and later to the camp in Rottleberode, which was evacuated by the Nazis in April 1945. Zbigniew Walc was then moved to Gardelegen, where 400 other prisoners were being held. On 14 April, he and a thousand other camp inmates were driven by the Nazis into a barn, which was then set alight. Walc and nearly all the other prisoners died. Just one day later, US troops arrived in Gardelegen. 

 

On the day Walc was murdered in the flames, Krystyna Wituska had already been dead for nearly a year. She was executed by guillotine on 26 June 1944 in the “Roter Ochse” prison in Halle/Saale. Before her death, Wituska wrote a goodbye letter to her parents, in which she also mentions her friendly guard Helga Grimpe: 

“Dear parents! You will receive this letter after my death. It will be sent to you by a person whom we have so much to thank for (Helga Grimpe). Here, she was our friend and carer at the same time. At risk to her life, she tried to alleviate our suffering as best she could. She shared everything with us that she had in a truly selfless way. (...) While I’m writing this letter, I naturally know nothing about the outcome of my request for clemency, but you can believe me when I say that I am ready for death and that I am not getting up my hopes in vain. Being separated from you for several months has increased my affection for you even more, and I will find it hard to go and leave you behind feeling so sad. Please believe me, though, that I can meet my death with my head held high and without fear. This is my final duty to you and to my country. For me, prison was a good and sometimes also difficult lesson in life, but there were days that were so joyous and sunny. (...) We will die on the eve of victory and with the knowledge that we have not acted against injustice and violence in vain. Do not grieve, dearest parents, be brave, Mummy. Think that I am always looking down on you and that every one of your tears causes me pain. I will smile at you when you smile at me. May God reward you for the love and care that you have shown me! Adieu, dear parents, adieu Halinka. Your Tina.”[2]

Krystyna Wituska’s body was handed over to the institute of anatomy at the University of Halle. In 2014, a memorial stela with a plaque and relief image of Krystyna Wituska was erected in the Gertraudenfriedhof cemetery in Halle, where she and 60 other victims of the Nazi regime were buried anonymously. This would not have been possible without the letter written in 2003 by Maria Kacprzyk, her fellow prisoner who survived the war, to the former “Roter Ochse” prison, now a memorial site, in the hope of obtaining information about her friend who had been executed there. This letter sparked the years of research by Lars Skowronski, a historian at the “Roter Ochse” memorial site, and the publicist Simone Trieder. The results led to several publications, including two books, dedicated to Krystyna Wituska, the other Polish women prisoners, and Zbigniew Walc. The memories of Maria Kacprzyk and the women who survived the Nazi prison have made it possible to commemorate the life of Krystyna Wituska and the other women executed by the Hitler regime by means of the symbolic stela in the Gertraudenfriedhof cemetery. On 18 March 2010, Krystyna Wituska was posthumously awarded the Commandery of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her “special services rendered for the independence of the Republic of Poland”.

 

Monika Stefanek, February 2021

 

 

Literature:

• S. Trieder, L. Skowronski, Zelle Nr. 18. Eine Geschichte von Mut und Freundschaft. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn 2014.
• S. Trieder, Nik und Tina. Gefährliche Briefe 1938-1944. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) 2018.
• A. Morawska, Wybór listów Krystyny Wituskiej, Miesięcznik Znak, Kraków 1969, nr 9.
• P. Bukalska, Śmierć w Berlinie. Tygodnik Powszechny, 19.04.2011.