Krystyna Green (nee Szatkowska) was born in the Fallingbostel displaced persons camp near Heilbronn, Germany on March 13, 1946 to a young Polish woman who had been enslaved by the Nazis during the war and a father she had always assumed was a serving German soldier. Then, 78 years and eight months later – Tuesday, November 12, 2024 at the Surrey History Centre, Woking – on a bright autumn morning she was given a copy of her “Ockenden Venture Record Card” dated March 27, 1960, and a brief description of “FAMILY CIRCUMSTANCES”, which her daughter, Hannah Barrs, read in a half whisper befitting the library’s reading room:
“This girl’s mother Stefania was born on 6.3.22 in Liebark [Lidzbark] near Dzialdowa [Dzialdowo]. She grew up in a children’s Home and remained on there as a helper until 1940, when the Germans deported her for forced labour. Due to the bad conditions and long working hours – at least 18 a day – she became very run down and nervous and frightened of her German taskmasters. After the liberation she lived in Tueleen, Fallingbostel and Braunschweig camps. Krystyna’s father, Marian Bieniek, disappeared before she was born on 13.3.46. After the mother developed T.B. in 1950, the daughter had to go to a children’s Home until 1958, when she returned to the camp, and the mother was discharged from hospital, where she had been in both T.B. and mental wards. They exist on public assistance of less than £7 per month, and the cost of living is higher in Germany than in England.
“It is important that this child be given a chance away from her present environment, as the mother’s health is deteriorating, and she refuses to return to a German children’s Home.” – signed Sue Ryder, Welfare Worker
When to their shock and some awe Krystyna’s father was named in her ‘circumstances’ she could only exclaim: “I have a father!”. She also learned that he was Polish, not German.
Krystyna was only 13 years old at the height of the ‘Cold War’ when she was taken in by the Ockenden Venture, as it was then known. The camp she was living in was on the border between East and West Germany and patrolled by armed guards only five metres apart. “We children used to tease them by daring each other to cross the sandy track that marked the border,” Krystyna recalled.
Thousands shared similar harrowing post-war stories – and worse. This is Krystyna’s:
Some 250,000 WWII refugees, many of them children orphaned by the war and its aftermath, settled in the United Kingdom between 1946 and the early 1960s. More than 500 children, many orphaned and/or living in dire conditions, were given a new start by the Ockenden Venture. Krystyna Szatkowska was one of them.
The young Pole was only 13 when she was taken from the Mariental-Horst displaced people camp, which housed 1,000 families in its central location in Germany, to ‘Ockenden’ in Woking, Surrey. It was early 1960. She spoke no English and was so defiant and angry about her circumstances that she had to be carried from the car that brought her and several other children from their refugee camps across the Continent and The English Channel to the start of a new life, though she did not care to know it at the time.
“I was not happy”, says Krystyna, now 78, and reflecting on her life at her daughter Hannah’s home in the seaside town of Broadstairs, Kent; about as geographically close to where she started from as one can get on mainland British soil.
Krystyna detested authority, even the caring sort, and didn’t speak for the 14 months she lived at ‘Ockenden’, the house where the founder of The Ockenden Venture, Joyce Pearce, grew up and which gave its name to the organisation known now as Ockenden International. The home first opened its doors– and bedrooms – to displaced Europeans in 1953 when 17 orphaned children from war-ravaged Germany were given a three-week holiday there, igniting the Venture and more than 70 years advancing the self-reliance of refugees, displaced people and asylum-seekers all over the world.
She didn’t not talk, conceding that: “I did speak to the other children at Ockenden in my dormitory”.
“I hated it because I had to leave my mother behind and I didn’t understand and no one explained. Slowly I did learn that my mother was to follow when she was well enough. As she was recovering from TB (tuberculosis) and surgery to remove a lung, she was not allowed to travel. But I was her carer and had been since I was six years old,” Krystyna said. She needed me more than I needed her, or so I believed.” Her mother’s TB had in years previous cost the family an opportunity for post-war resettlement in the USA.
Krystyna’s “mutti” (mother), Stefania Szatkowska, had been taken from Poland to Fallingbostell during the war to work on a nearby farm, where she ended up caring for five German children.
A year or so after Krystyna was born, Stefania had a son, Mieczyslaw. Then, C. 1949, Stefania contracted tuberculosis, which was rife in the camps. She and her children were then separated. Stefania was sent to a sanitorium and the two young siblings were moved to a nunnery at Helmstedt in central Germany.
“I looked after my little brother from the age of five,” Krystyna said.
Krystina at her brother’s graveside C. 1952.
For some four years, until 1952 or ‘53, the two young siblings only saw their mother once or twice a year through an ambulance window. Krystyna by now, inured to the harsh realities of her life toughed it out “perhaps because I had to be the responsible one,” she says, “but Mieczyslaw struggled” – then he too became ill.
Because food was always in short supply, Krystyna and Mieczyslaw – and all of the children in the camp – would forage for food in the nearby woods. They became adept at finding mushrooms and berries and milking blood from animals that had been slaughtered.
A year later Mieczyslaw died and it was many years before Krystyna learned the cause was renal failure. Devastated by the loss of the brother she loved so much, “and was not allowed to see or touch in hospital . . . I believed it was my fault.” Still, she was made to stand at his grave on three separate occasions, and pray.
“Because of her TB, my mutti was not allowed to attend the funeral,” she said disconsolate still. Krystyna, aged six or seven, never felt more alone.
At the Helmstedt nunnery Krystyna was forbidden to speak Polish. She was even forced to Germanise the spelling of her name to Christina.
The nuns’ strict regime however only exacerbated Krystyna’s anger and fear: running away became a way of life, though she recalls: “one kind nun, who noticed how much music calmed me down, would occasionally let me come to her room and listen to records with her.”
“I was then transferred to another children’s home run by nuns in Braunsweig, which was for older children. I hated it too.”
Circa 1957, when Stefania was well enough, authorities moved her to the Mariental-Horst displaced people camp, also near Helmstedt, and Krystyna was given a note with her mother’s details and told to join her at the camp, where she was meant to start school. However, getting to and from school was too dangerous so she spent most of her days foraging for food in the woods. At this time she joined the ‘black work’ force – cheap labour for local famers, which entailed waiting at the edge of a field for a tractor towing a trailer that would slowly drive by allowing workers to jump on board and hide themselves under hessian sacks to evade the authorities. This was an illegal practice but payment, usually in food, was too good an opportunity to refuse when camp provisions were so meagre.
She worked from dawn to dusk, which meant very long days in summer when darkness didn’t come until 10pm, earning one bowl of soup a day, “which I loved. I was also able to sneak potatoes back to my mother in the camp,” she added. Krystyna and other camp children would also try to take milk from cows or blood drained from slaughtered animals. She still remembers wincingly how the grazes on her unprotected knees from working the ground were “constantly inflected and, I was always hungry,” she said. But it was her and her mother’s life for the next three years.
The camp buildings were three-storey for some 300 families on each floor sharing just three toilets and two cold water taps. “Each room was furnished with one single bed, a stove and two buckets – one for water and one for a toilet,” Krystyna remembers vividly. “On the other side of the camp, segregated from us, was accommodation for displaced Germans and former Nazi soldiers and outcasts.
“In many ways it was better than Fallingbostel,” she recalls, “where rough curtains served as dividing walls between family cubicles in camp buildings housing hundreds of Slav and Polish families – four families to a ‘room’.
“At Mariental-Horst, because of a lack of men to protect us, women and children incurred all sorts of abuse. My mother never said who my father was, wouldn’t talk about it, so I had always assumed she was raped. I don’t know. For so long it was how I believed my baby brother and I came to be,” Krystyna reasoned.
Occasionally charities from the United Kingdom were invited to the camp to ‘rescue’ the most deprived children by re-homing them in Britain. When organisations such as The Ockenden Venture and Save the Children appeared, Krystyna would make herself scarce, often hiding high in the Fir trees on the fringes of the camp: she did not want to be separated from her mother. She would hide in the Firs until the charities had gone. She stayed in the trees for two days and two nights on one such visit, only coming down to go to the toilet, which is how she eventually came to be placed on a minibus to be filled with children going to ‘Ockenden’ in Woking, Surrey, England. This was done with Stefania’s consent and blessing but according to Krystyna: “no one told me.”
They drove from their East-West German border camp to the Channel where they boarded a ferry to England. They were all frightened as they had never travelled so far and none had ever seen the sea. “As it happened’” Krystyna said, “there was a huge storm on the crossing and we all thought we were going to die.”
When they did arrive at Ockenden, Krystyna was shocked to learn her mother would not be following her for a while. She refused to speak. Then Ockenden’s own Joyce Pearce she believes, “a tiny woman, very patient,” suggested she join a family, who were friends of hers in Barnard Castle, County Durham.
“I liked the idea of a mum and dad and my own home and agreed to go.”
She later learned that it was meant to be for just two weeks but she stayed with Rev John and Mrs Adrianne Brown and their family until she was 17. The vicar and his wife had three children of their own and three foster children one of whom they adopted. Krystyna loved her little foster brother Timothy who had Downs Syndrome and remains close to her older foster brother Jonathan to this day.
At 17, she got a job at the nearby Glaxo Laboratory, which made penicillin, working in sterilisation of glass medical equipment: “so boring” and at 21 left to join BUA (British United Airlines) as an Air Hostess –“the second language helped” – travelling the world until she married Malcolm Green, an RE (Religious Education) school teacher, and raised a family of her own – a son and a daughter who have given her five grandchildren, all of whom live nearby in Kent. When she turned 21 she had to arrange, privately, accommodation for her mother, who had followed her from Germany and who did live long enough to know her grandchildren.
Krystyna, after marriage and motherhood, became what we now know as a mature age student, qualifying as a special needs teacher, who, when she retired had headed two specialist units for severally autistic children at the Royal School for Deaf Children in Margate. Her husband, Malcolm Green, who died in 2019 was head of a residential school for dyslexic children. They enjoyed almost 50 years of marriage – and working with challenging children.
It’s little wonder she has a way with teenagers: “My favourite age. I just get them.” “Now,” she says, “it’s all about my grandchildren. I love them very much, they love me: we get on.”
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