The story of Rozalia Genza and her son Zbyszek

In the last summer of the war, on 12 June 1944, a child is born in the Celle State Women’s Hospital, a little boy. His birth certificate is registered in the town’s registry office with the number 1191 for the current year, and he is given the name Zbyzsek by his mother, a form of the Polish first name Zbigniew, which means ‘he who frees himself from his anger’ – his full name is Zbyszek Genza.

Zbyszek’s birth certificate will later be marked ‘Russian’, he has a Polish first name, but things are a little more complicated, because his mother is born in Kozyna, a town in the west of present-day Ukraine, between the cities of Ternopil and Lviv, also known as Lviv. Ternopil is usually called Tarnopol at this time, and in fact these places have been given names in a wide variety of languages over the course of their eventful history, as the region of Eastern Galicia in which they are located is an area that has reflected the political upheavals of Europe over the centuries.

When Rozalia Genza, Zbyszek’s mother, is born on 22 September 1922, the region around Kozyna is once again hotly contested. After the end of the First World War and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, Poland and Ukraine are fighting over the area, while at the same time the influence of the newly formed Soviet Union is growing. At the Paris Peace Conference in the winter of 1919, Eastern Galicia is finally awarded to Poland for a period of 25 years, after which a referendum is planned, but this will never materialise.

Rozalia Genza grows up in a rather rural area and the family doesn’t have an easy life due to the turbulent times. She is sixteen years old when the Second World War begins with the German invasion of Poland.

A year later, Poland has been divided into German Reich territory and the so-called Generalgouvernement, the occupied south-east of Poland. Germany is now at war on several fronts, with new waves of call-up notices calling more and more men to arms.

In order to compensate for the massive loss of labour, a system is developed right from the start of the war that exploits prisoners of war and political prisoners for this purpose. Above all, however, countless people are deported from the so-called ‘eastern territories’ and turned into forced labourers. In total, over 20 million people in the German Reich and the conquered territories are forced to work during the war. They are deployed everywhere, in armaments factories as well as in agriculture, on building sites, in the trades or in private households.

Rozalia’s family is now also informed that a member of the family has to be sent to work in the Reich. Her older brother is supposed to go, but he is already married and has a family – and so Rozalia decides to leave home in his place and sets off into the unknown; she is 17 years old when she is deported.

Several weeks later, she arrives at her destination, a small farming village in Lower Saxony called Ramlingen. The farmers there have applied to the Landesbauernschaft for labourers and register those working for them with the Landeskrankenkasse so that they are insured in the event of an accident at work and do not incur any additional costs.

Ramlingen has a population of around 600 at this time, but many of them are at the front as soldiers. Therefore, as in every village in the area, there are soon so-called Eastern workers everywhere, only a small number of the labourers are prisoners of war, for example from Belgium or France. The vast majority are Poles, then Ukrainians, and later also many Russians. In total, there are over 160 names in the lists of the state health insurance fund for Ramlingen and Ehlershausen.

Every farm in Ramlingen employs forced labourers, with one exception: the farmer Max Fodimann does not receive a permit for labour from the state farmers’ association, he and his family are forced to run the farm on their own.

The many forced labourers in Ramlingen have no rights; they are paid at the discretion of their employers and treated as they see fit. Officially, Germans are not supposed to have any contact at all with these Eastern labourers; according to National Socialist ideology, they are not equal human beings.

Rozalia Genza is employed with several other labourers on one of the farms, and she is lucky: she lives and works in tolerable conditions and is treated well. But she is also still very young and misses her family, especially her mother. Years later, she will write about this time in her memoirs:

Wartime is not easy in Ramlingen either, especially not for the forced labourers. But while working in the fields, Rozalia meets a young man, a Pole called Leon Filipiak, and becomes friends with him. They meet once, then more often, and eventually become a couple during this difficult time. It is hard to say how secret this relationship must be, but according to the official interpretation, it is not only unwelcome, it is forbidden.

When Rozalia becomes pregnant and gives birth to her son Zbyszek in Celle in June 1944, she is lucky again: she is able to live on the farm with the child, a circumstance that is anything but a matter of course: at this time, countless female forced labourers have to hand over their newborn children to so-called ‘foreign children’s nursing homes’. There are also such centres nearby, one in Großburgwedel and another in Papenhorst. The newborns there often only live for a few weeks or months they die from complete neglect, lack of care and malnutrition. It is an organised, deliberate mass murder of children, and one of the darkest chapters of this period.

Rozalia, however, is able to live with her young son on the Ramlinger farm, and even Zbyszek’s father Leon is presumably able to spend time with him.

But then comes autumn, and the cold. Zbyszek falls ill with pneumonia, he is shaken by increasingly severe febrile convulsions – and finally dies on the night of 6 November 1944. He is four months old.

The next day, the farmer’s wife reports his death to the mayor, who is also the registrar; Heinrich Bähre issues the death certificate on 7 November. A funeral is organised on the farm, there is not much time, but several people are with Rozalia and Leon and accompany them on what is probably the most difficult walk of all, carrying their own child to the grave.

Zbyszek is buried in the Ramlingen cemetery, only about twenty metres from the memorial; it is an unadorned grave without a headstone.

Five months later, another grave will be dug right next to it, for a little girl named Christa. She is also a child of forced labourers in Ramlingen, the married couple Wladislawa and Franczek Sokol, who are employed on the farm diagonally opposite Rozalia. Christa dies a few days after the Allied troops arrive in Ramlingen, on 28 April 1945; like Zbyszek, she is only four months old.

The two children’s graves are probably still visible until the 1950s, after which they are levelled and presumably buried over. But their location can be determined quite precisely from a sketch made in 1946 by the later mayor Erich Bähre.

Rozalia lives through the end of the war on the farm in Ramlingen, where she and Leon are registered with the state health insurance fund until 31 May 1945. Then they leave the village. Neither of them will return to the place where they spent almost five years of their lives and where their son is buried.

After the end of the war, Rozalia and Leon set off back towards their homeland, without knowing where that actually is or what might await them there.

First, however, they are stranded in a refugee camp in Hänigsen, disparagingly referred to by the locals as the ‘Polish camp’, where they spend several months. During this time, Rozalia gives birth to a second child, her daughter Wanda, who is born on 8 October 1945.

The hardship and turmoil of the post-war period are immense, and the fate that lies behind them probably weighs just as heavily as the thoughts of the long and rocky road back home. But in these difficult times, the birth of Wanda is perhaps like a miracle that gives the young parents strength and fills them with new courage to face life – and perhaps also a sign of a future together that is difficult to imagine in the face of the present.

Rozalia and Leon make it. After many detours, they arrive in 1947 in Wierzbice, a village south of Wroclaw, where they are able to move into a small farm. There they begin a new life as a family, with their daughter Wanda. And then also with Krysia, Ula, Bozenka, Janusz, Andrzej and Marzenka, and finally they lead an often difficult but happy life with seven children on their farm.

Leon dies at the age of 85 after a full life. But Rozalia Filipiak, née Genza, doesn’t die until 2023, aged 101 – as the mother of seven children, grandmother of 14 grandchildren and great-grandmother of 20 great-grandchildren.

(Text: Sven Voigt)