TWO LIVES – ONE FATE: Irena Bobowska – Bronisława Czubakowska

And do not regret what has passed,
And do not fear what might come!

 

Irena Bobowska was born on 3 September 1920 in Posen/Poznań, where she grew up in a family that actively supported independence. She was also left reliant on a wheelchair for the rest of her life after contracting polio as a child.[2] Her strong personality and her will to live helped her complete lower secondary school and to develop her talent for music and poetry. She was also actively involved in social activities, such as a project which founded Poznań's first library for young people. In the summer of 1939, there was a recruitment drive for crew members for human torpedoes. The young woman volunteered for duty without telling her parents.[3] At the end of 1939, she joined the POZ (Polska Organizacja Zbrojna), a conspiratorial Polish military organisation, and in the spring of 1940, the Polish Military Organisation for the Western Territories (Wojskowa Organizacja Ziem Zachodnich). Irena Bobowska was a co-founder of the journal “Pobudka” (“wake-up call”), the mouthpiece of the POZ, and also contributed articles.

In June 1940, the young woman was arrested in Poznań. During the interrogations that followed, she was tortured physically and psychologically. She was beaten and humiliated, and her wheelchair was taken away from her. She was then taken to a prison in Berlin-Spandau and to the prison hospital in Berlin-Alt Moabit.

In August 1942, the higher regional court for Poznań met for an external session in Berlin during which three of the four defendants were sentenced to death for “high treason”. As well as Irena Bobowska, they included Stanisław Michalski, codename “Łoś” (elk), who worked for the “Kurier Poznański” (“Poznań Courier”), and Radziwój Zakrzewski, a businessman and member of the Scout movement. The fourth defendant, Herbert Lorkowski, was sentenced to six years in a penal camp.[4]

At dawn on 27 September 1942, Irena Bobowska was executed by guillotine in Berlin-Plötzensee.

 

“As I learn the highest skill in life”

To smile always and everywhere
And to bear pain without complaint,
And not regret what has passed,
And not fear what might come!
I tasted the taste of hunger
And sleepless nights (a long time ago)
And I know how the cold bites,
When you want to curl up
To protect yourself from it.
And I know what it means
To shed tears of helplessness,
By the light of day,
In the dark of night.
And I learned to accelerate the time,
Which so mercilessly drags on, with my mind,
And I know how much one must struggle with oneself,
Not to fall and not to tire.
This path seems endless...
And I am still learning the highest skill in life:
To smile always and everywhere
And to bear pain without complaint,
And not regret what has passed,
And not fear what might come![5]

 

“Her poetry not only spoke words of comfort and strength to her fellow sufferers, but also to the prisoners in Auschwitz concentration camp. After the war, she helped the political prisoners in [Bydgoszcz-]Fordon to survive,” write the authors of the “Polkopedia” article [online encyclopaedia on Poles living abroad - translator’s note].[6] 

 

Irena Bobowska’s name became known in Berlin thanks to Anna Krenz, an artist and political and environmental campaigner, initiator of the “Polonijna Rada Kobiet/International Council of Polish Women” and founder of the Dziewuchy Berlin (“Girls Berlin”) group.[7] Bobowska’s poem “As I learn...” (Polish: “Bo ja się uczę…”) was first recited in Berlin on 8 March 2021 in the German translation by Ewa Maria Slaska, as part of a performance by Dziewuchy Berlin at a demonstration to mark international women’s day. Her work was also read during commemorative events marking the end of the Second World War on 8 May 2021 and during the protest campaign on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on 25 November 2021. Further projects focussing on Irena Bobowska and the culture of remembrance also include the translation of more of her poems into German, this time by a different female translator.

During the same year, Anna Krenz and Ewa Maria Slaska implemented a project funded by the Berlin Senate, “Irena Bobowska - Die vergessene Heldin” (“Irena Bobowska. The Forgotten Heroine”).[8] “In September 2022, four events will take place, including a debate about remembrance of Poles, particularly Polish women in Berlin, a performance that honours the life and death of Irena Bobowska, and an exhibition. The project will culminate in a publication, and the first steps will be taken to create a place of remembrance for Irena Bobowska. For this purpose, a commemorative plaque will be affixed to the prison wall in Alt Moabit and/or to a tree in Altglienicke cemetery”.[9]

 

“I accept. I do not feel guilty.”
 

- This was the answer given by Bronisława Czubakowska to the state prosecution official when he informed her that her beheading had been delayed by one day to 15 August 1942, 5:27 a.m.[10]

Bronisława Czubakowska was born on 9 July 1916 in the small town of Zgierz near Łódź. Her father was a labourer and her mother was a homemaker. She died when Bronisława was still very young. On 9 November 1939, Łódź, including the town and district of Zgierz, was annexed to the Recih District (“Reichsgau”) of Wartheland. After the German occupation of the region, a general requirement to provide forced labour was issued for the Polish population, although at first, the German employment offices only recruited volunteers to be sent to the Reich. However, in the late spring and early summer of 1940, harsher measures were applied to acquire cheaper (and in many cases, more subjugated) workers, including arbitrary arrests.[11] One of the victims of these “manhunts” was Bronisława Czubakowska, who was finally assigned to a fine jute thread spinning works in Brandenburg an der Havel, about 85 km from Berlin.

Aside from the German workforce, this factory employed 250 forced labourers from Poland, who produced thread for civilian customers, but also for the armament industry. The factory also had commercial connections to the concentration camps in the Third Reich and was thus a profiteer of the war.

 

What happened on 12 July 1941 and during the days that followed?
 

In interrogation protocols found in the Gestapo archives, it is stated that on 12 July 1941, Czubakowska started a fire in the toilet for German employees, using scraps of newspaper provided there in a wooden box for use as toilet paper. It was claimed that she had been given the petrol and matches by a female Polish colleague. A female worker who had visited the toilet for the forced labourers shortly afterwards caught the smell of fire and extinguished it together with Bronisława Czubakowska. Bronisława altered her statement multiple times, until she finally claimed, during an interrogation on 25 July, that she had started the fire herself, without receiving help or encouragement from anyone else.[12]

For the Gestapo, the case was therefore closed. The file was passed on to the state prosecutor at Potsdam District Court. Already on 10 September 1941, the court issued a sentence of seven years imprisonment. During the same month following the judgement, the leading state prosecutor at the Potsdam District Court, Karl Tetzlaff, was requested by the Ministry of Justice of the Third Reich to assess whether a harsher punishment might be in order. Tetzlaff, who had already acted for the prosecution in the first case against Czubakowska, bowed to the political pressure and revised his sentence. In October 1941, he unsuccessfully attempted to withdraw his revision. He was also required to regularly report to the Minister of Justice in relation to the case.

Neither the doubt that arose from the conflicting witness statements nor the reasons why Czubakowska had altered her statement multiple times were addressed. Not in the first or in the second trial, which ended with a death sentence. In addition, neither court gave a plausible reason as to the motive of the defendant. Instead, they accepted without question the explanation given by state prosecutor Tetzlaff: that the Polish woman had acted out of hatred towards Germany and the German people. The legal principle of in dubio pro reo, which could have impacted the harshness of the punishment, was not applied. There is no doubt, therefore, that greater weight was given to the country of origin of the defendant than to the harm that she caused. In light of the “Polish decrees” and the “Polish Criminal Regulation” that came into force later, this case against Czubakowska and the review proceedings are a textbook example of how narrow the dividing line was at that time between justice and injustice.[13] Not only that: it clearly demonstrates how the political attitudes of the time impacted criminal justice. They were intended to influence the judicial system and ultimately to bend it to the will and aims of those in power.

The death sentence against Bronisława Czubakowska was overturned by the Director of Public Prosecutions of the State of Brandenburg on 29 April 2005. The legal basis for this decision was the “Law on the Abrogation of Unjust Verdicts in Criminal Justice by National Socialist Courts” (“Gesetz zur Aufhebung nationalsozialistischer Unrechtsurteile in der Strafrechtspflege”) of 25 August 1998.[14]

Let the deaths of the two Polish women be a warning to us all, who believed that the fascist barbarity came to an end, if not in Nuremberg, then at the latest before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

 

Wojtek Drozdek, May 2022

 

Acknowledgements:

My thanks go to Ewa Maria Slaska and Anna Krenz for their pertinent support, and to Ela Kargol for providing photographic material free of charge. I am grateful to Klaus Leutner for allowing me to view the archive.