Mitka's Secret

A True Story of Child Slavery and Surviving the Holocaust

Steven W. Brallier, Joel N. Lohr, Lynn G. Beck

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467460859
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito religioso

The remarkable life story of Mitka Kalinski, who survived seven years of enslavement—while still a child—to a Nazi officer during and after World War II

Mitka Kalinski had never revealed his past to anyone. Not even to his wife or his four children.

But in 1981, three decades after it had all ended, Mitka finally broke his silence about the horrors he had endured during the Holocaust and in the years immediately afterward: not only German concentration camps and sadistic medical experiments but also seven years of enslavement in the household of a Nazi officer, "Iron" Gustav Dörr.

Having been orphaned before the war, Mitka did not know his origins or even his name. Torture, slavery, and a false name stripped him of his identity entirely. Thus, when he immigrated to the United States in 1951, Mitka seized the opportunity to bury his past and forge a new life. He lived the American life in all its fullness and moved to Nevada with his beloved wife, Adrienne, and their children. But the secret he carried became an increasingly heavy burden, preventing wholeness and healing.

This is Mitka's account of facing the past, confronting his captors, connecting with lost relatives, and finding peace in the rediscovery of his origins. For Mitka, this also meant reclaiming his Jewish heritage—a journey that gave him a new sense of purpose and freedom from the lingering effects of trauma that had filled his life to that point. By the end, Mitka's Secret is less a story of survival and more one of redemption and transformation—from hidden suffering to abundant joy.

Slavery

CHAPTER ONE

Kinderheim

Bila Tserkva and Kiev, 1939–1941

“One … two … three … four … five …”

A boy—five or six years old—counted as the bombs fell.

From the oilcloth-covered table in his Sparks, Nevada, home, Mitka Kalinski recounts one of his earliest childhood traumas. His fists contract to punctuate words, of anger, pain, longing, joy.

“During the night, five bombs. You ask me, how do I remember five? A five-or six-year-old kid can count to five—so five—one, two, three …” He counts with his fingers. “So five bombs—and I was scared.”

Six-year-old Mitka wore a nightgown—a heavy one, he remembers, as it was one of the few garments he owned. He cowered in his bed, the first in two long rows. Plaster crashed from the ceiling.

“My sheet fell on the floor and I was scared to pick it up and I was curled up like this.” He pulls his arms into his chest and lowers his head, cringing.

It was dark. The boy looked around as best he could. He saw no adults, which had been the case for several days. Only children—young children—surrounded him. The older ones slept in another room. A month earlier, a teacher had told the children that everything would change in the coming weeks.

“So five bombs. That’s probably what she was talking about. The bombs came.”

The morning after the bombs fell—the morning after he lay counting, without covers, on his cot—he remembers hearing an inaudible voice telling him to flee. Mitka trusted the voice and obeyed. Barefoot and wearing his heavy nightgown, Mitka and another child, a boy whose name he cannot recall, ran from the building. The boys fled across the Ros River, which at that time of year was low enough to ford. The potato and wheat harvests, the shallow river, and Hitler’s offensive push into Russia help to establish the time frame as late summer or early autumn.

After knocking on the doors of several homes and being turned away, the boys came to a forked road. They argued about which way to take and, both being strong-willed, chose differently. Mitka pressed forward, alone, into the woods.

Two years earlier Mitka had arrived at the Kinderheim, a boarding school for young children, in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine. Marigolds were blooming, he recalls, though at the time he didn’t know the word for the flower. Decades later, brushing his hand across yellow petals, he recognized the pungent scent and was immediately transported back to his arrival in Bila Tserkva. And to a woman whose face he cannot see or remember, but who held his hand.

“I remember being on a horse wagon with people with black hats and long shawls, and I remember fleeing. Later I found out that the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. I think we might have been fleeing from Poland to the Ukraine. So that was the year this all happened. It was 1939.”

The recollection of a flight in a horse-drawn vehicle is one of only a handful of memories Mitka has of life before his arrival at the Kinderheim.

“I remember a man. He came to a house. He had a nice little sports car with a wheel, a spare tire, in the back, and he carved me a boat for the water with a knife like this.” As he speaks, Mitka mimics carving, paying great attention to the details of the remembered toy boat. He continues, “And he had a patch over his eye.”

The man with the patch set the boat on water, and the two watched it float.

Several beats pass before Mitka says, with plaintive tenderness: “I think that man was my father.” He continues, his voice unusually soft and halting, “My father—I can hardly say those words. I’m not even sure what they mean.”

A less vivid but nonetheless cherished memory is of a woman with dark hair who was affectionate toward him.

“I remember a lady, and, one particular time, I was in the crib, so I had to be very, very young. She had a rubber band that she gave to me. I remember taking the rubber band like a string to make music … ping, ping, ping.” He makes a rhythmical twanging with his voice, his hands miming the plucking of the band. “She gave me the rubber band, and she gave me a hug and then walked away. I was in the crib standing, and I watched her walk out the door. She had long hair. She closed the door. That’s the last I saw her. I believe she was my mother.”

He wants desperately to remember more of this woman. He cannot.

His next memory, he believes, is from a time shortly after the flight from Poland. “I remember playing with two little girls, and my father had to go into the war…. I bet he left me to go to the war.”

At this point in the telling Mitka breaks from memories and tries to make sense of what happened next. He believes he was most likely living with someone other than his parents, possibly placed there by his father. “And that’s when the people I was staying with probably had the idea—and this is me now speaking—to put me out of their house and to put me somewhere else. And that woman”—not the rubber-band woman, but his intermediary caregiver—“took me to the Kinderheim. And now I put two and two together. Do you know why they put me out of the house?”

The look in his eyes makes clear that this is an important question for Mitka. It’s one of many that has haunted him. Acknowledging that he doesn’t know a sure answer, he offers his best guess: “I think they learned what I was—a Jewish boy.”

Mitka pauses. There is something important for him in this realization.

“They figured out that if the Nazis found out, the whole family would have been wiped out. I don’t know if it is true or not, that if they were harboring a Jew they would have been wiped out. I don’t know if it was true, but I came to that conclusion.

“I always thought that because I wasn’t wanted, I was sent to the boarding school. I wasn’t wanted. I always knew that I was different because of what I was and the language I spoke—that I was different and I wasn’t wanted. I never saw the woman who put me there again—the woman who took me by the hand and put me there.”

As Mitka continues, his jaw tightens and his voice gets firmer.

“She put me in Bila Tserkva,” he says matter-of-factly but with an anger-tinged tone. “She put me in that boarding school and left me there. I do know that I did not want to be there. I carried on, and they put me in a corner. I did not know what was happening. I just knew that I did not want to be there. I was a bad boy, and they made me stand in a corner.”

Mitka often repeats the phrases “they put me in a corner” and “I was a bad boy” as he remembers the Kinderheim. They reflect, it seems, both the shame and the isolation he felt.

As quickly as it comes, the anger leaves. Mitka pulls his shoulders in and wraps his arms around his body. “When I think about it now, right now, I am that little boy. I don’t think I ever grew up. I’m still six years old in my mind. I’m still there.”

Two winters passed while he was at the school. He is certain about this detail. Seasons were the way he recalled the passage of time.

Other fleeting impressions stuck with him. He knew the Kinderheim was a place he did not want to be, but not all his memories are hurtful. He remembers liking the chicken he was fed for meals. And playing with a tricycle, a pedal car, and a hoop and stick.

He recalls gazebos around the yard, or as he describes them, “umbrellas built of wood.” He sketches a simple yet detailed drawing of the boarding house and points to the four gazebo locations. Within the building he identifies an office, dormitories, a laundry room, and a kitchen. On his drawing he shows where the outhouse stood and where the Ros River flowed adjacent to the grounds. He also shows where the school’s resident peacock roamed—he collected its feathers and talked to it. “I always talked to animals. They talked back. I could hear what they said,” Mitka proudly declares. He remembers giving one teacher a peacock feather. To this day he keeps a peacock feather close by, standing in a tall vase in the corner of his living room.

A field trip into town is another memory. The city’s name, Bila Tserkva, means “white church,” and there was such a church. At the time Bila Tserkva could be described as a religious city, home not only to Christians but also to a large, active, and sometimes persecuted Jewish community. The church Mitka remembers may or may not have been the church for which the town was named, though this is unimportant to Mitka. He’d been to the church with other children. He describes statues—lots of statues—but not in the area where Mass was said. On this same outing Mitka saw his first movie.

As he remembers people from this time in his life, he recalls a “night watchman,” an “office lady,” other unnamed adults, and especially the woman who dropped him off at the Kinderheim.

Mitka sees no faces in his memories of this time, only bodies. This experience of not remembering faces, just bodies, gnaws at him. He struggles to comprehend why he sees no eyes, noses, mouths, and ears. “Maybe it was because I was so little. I don’t know.” He wishes he could remember more—especially of his life before the Kinderheim.

In mid-August 1941, on the day bombs fell on Bila Tserkva, Mitka and the other children were forced to contend with Hitler’s devastating vision. In pursuit of racial purity and of Lebensraum, or “living space,” where the master race could propagate, Hitler and his men spent the spring and summer of 1939 preparing for war. Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. France and England responded on September 2, declaring war against Germany.

On June 22, 1941, in direct violation of a nonaggression pact signed by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, the Nazis raised the ante considerably by invading the Soviet Union. Under the code name of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler moved from a war of domination to a full-throated Vernichtungskrieg, or “war of annihilation.”

Bila Tserkva was one of the towns in Hitler’s path.

In their march through Ukraine in summer 1941, the Nazis targeted for arrest and execution all Jewish men between the ages of seventeen and forty-five. In July Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln approved the inclusion of women in massacres. In mid-August, Jewish babies and toddlers whose parents had been killed were transported to and locked in “a schoolhouse in Bila Tserkva.”

Before the bombing that prompted Mitka’s flight, he remembers soldiers arriving in “big green trucks” at the front of the Kinderheim, and children being unloaded. Mitka points to a place on his rough drawing about three quarters of the way down one side of the building and says with satisfaction, “And I could see it from here. In front of the office—that is where the trucks came.” He cannot explain why, but those green trucks bearing children somehow portended bad things. “Maybe it was what the teacher told us. I don’t know. I just felt like something bad was going to happen.”

Something bad did indeed occur. And not just the bombing.

On August 21 and 22, General Walther von Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army of Nazi Germany, ordered the slaughter of Bila Tserkva’s adult Jewish population, an act carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, elite Nazi killing squads, with the help of German soldiers and Ukrainian allies. Only children, stranded and locked in a school building, were left. Next, orders were given that stated, unequivocally, that the actions taken to stamp out “Judeo-Bolshevism” must, of necessity, include the killing of Jewish children.

The order was a hard one, even for disciplined and war-hardened soldiers. It was especially troubling to two military chaplains, Catholic priest Ernst Tewes and Lutheran minister Gerhard Wilczek. These chaplains attempted, with some success, to persuade a German officer, Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, that the murder of children was a step too far. The colonel brought the concerns to senior military officials, and the massacre was postponed while they were addressed. Ultimately, though, Groscurth came to agree that “alternative accommodation for the children was … impossible … and that this breed has to be exterminated.”

One soldier, a witness to the murders on August 22, described them with these words:

I went to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. I had nothing to do with this technical procedure. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later…. The grave was near some woods. It was not near the rifle range. The execution must have taken place in the afternoon at about 3:30 or 4:00. It took place the day after the discussions at the Feldkommandanten…. Many children were hit four or five times before they died.

Many years later, looking at photographs of Bila Tserkva, Mitka recognized the school building that housed the orphaned Jewish children. “That was it. That was the Kinderheim. Those children who were killed—they were the children that the trucks brought.” His other memories align with events preceding this massacre.

Mitka escaped execution by deciding to run from the school where he had lived for two years. Now a different and very real struggle for survival confronted the boy. He recalls walking and walking, for days and nights, always alone. Sometimes he trekked through forests, but more often it was through fields. In some fields he found potatoes beside furrows, potatoes missed in the harvest. “I always say no matter how good you plow, always one potato comes out. It always does that. And I walked on the field and I ate raw potatoes on the field.”

He continues. “In other fields I saw rows of golden ‘teepees.’ That is how I remember that it was fall. There was—what do you call it—this stuff that grows that they cut and they tie it together—like what you make bread of—wheat. And when it was tied together it would make a little teepee and you could sleep inside. It was like a little tent, and I slept inside.”

These standing grain stalks not only formed a shelter in which Mitka could sleep, they also gave him another food source. From the head of a stalk he broke off the husk and somehow released the kernels of wheat from it by rubbing. He also ate sorrel, a bitter-tasting plant he knew as Schavel.

Despite potatoes, wheat, and sorrel to eat, he was always hungry. “Hunger like this no one can understand. Five days, at least, with no food. When you’re hungry to death you find out what’s edible—raw potatoes and wheat.”

After days of walking and knocking on doors as he found them, his luck turned for the better, at least temporarily. At one of the houses an elderly woman said she would give him some food and let him sleep there if he would watch her cow until her son returned, and that when her son returned, he would have to leave. “I slept right at the back of the [entry] door … on some rags … some bundle of rags or something.”

How long he was at this farm, he can’t say. He does recall that when the woman’s son returned, “I was forced to leave.” As he started walking down the road, a German military convoy picked him up. (Mitka believes the woman or her son turned him over to the Germans for reward money.) The trucks were loaded with people, but he d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dediaction
• Contents
• Preface
• Slavery
• Secrets
• Redemption
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Authors