Justice-4-Poland.com
Connecting true geography and detailed unfolding of wide variety of crimes perpetrated by German/Ukrainian Nazis and jewish bolsheviks of Soviet Union on the Polish nation.
The Stolen Children of Poland: Holding Onto Identity in the Face of Erasure
One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the German occupation of Poland was the systematic kidnapping of Polish children deemed racially “suitable” for Germanization.
Through programs like Lebensborn, hundreds of thousands (200 – 220,000) of Polish boys and girls were forcibly taken from their families, placed in German homes or institutions, and subjected to Nazi indoctrination aimed at erasing their Polish identity.
But even in the face of this cruelty, many children resisted. Take the story of Alexander Michelowski, a 12-year-old Polish boy sent to a Lebensborn home in Austria. Despite enduring Hitler Youth routines such as marching, singing, and drilling Nazi ideology, he never let go of who he was.
He and a small group of Polish boys secretly spoke their native language, knowing they would be beaten if caught.
They foraged for food in the cellars and orchards, whispering in Polish as they shared stolen fruit in their dormitories at night.
For older children, it was easier to organise their associations into a memorable and communicable form.
Many already had a vivid and profoundly hostile sense of who the Germans were.
Moreover, as in children’s homes to this day, so also in wartime, it proved harder to place older boys than girls or younger children. Alexander Michelowski was one of those never claimed from the Lebensborn home at Oberweis Castle in Austria.
Despite the Hitler Youth routines of marching, singing, and drilling, twelve-year-old Alexander maintained a sense of the Polish identity.
In this, he was enormously helped by being in a group of other Polish boys, who kept their language alive on their secret food-hunting expeditions in the cellars and neighboring orchards and their late-night feasts in the dormitories, though they knew they would be badly beaten if caught speaking it.
On one such raid to gather fruit, they were discovered by a Polish woman who had been brought to the farm as a forced labourer. She agreed to send and receive mail on their behalf, reconnecting them to their homes. Although Alexander failed to make contact with any of his family, he had another, secret, link to his Polish roots, which he carried with him.
As he had waited in the station at Posen for the train that would take his group to Kalisch, a middle-aged woman had whispered to him and given him a picture of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.
She was, she told him, the mother superior of a nearby convent but did not dare to wear her habit because she was on a wanted list. Alexander, who had served as an altar boy, remembered her parting blessing:
“May the Mother of God protect you.”
This was the reality for thousands of Polish children, ripped from their families, forced to deny their heritage, yet desperately clinging to their roots in whatever way they could.
Some were too young to remember their Polish past, forever lost to history , but others, like Alexander, fought to hold onto their identity, even when speaking their own language meant brutal punishment.
These Polish children were stolen, stripped of their names, and forced to become someone else.
Some found their way home.
Many never did.
But through their courage, their whispered prayers, and their refusal to forget, some Polish hearts remained unbroken.
Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives Under the Nazis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
Edward Reid
(https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=870713482137923&set=a.159252953283983)
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