Teofila Knorowska (1924-2002)
Teofila Knorowska (née Turska) was born on 25 May 1924 in Baranowicze, Poland. She lived with her parents and sister in Warsaw, where she attended a grammar school. In the spring of 1942, Teofila Turska was arrested during a street raid in Warsaw and abducted to Germany as a forced labourer.
As an agricultural forced labourer
On her arrival she was sent to Gustav Löhmer’s farm in Burscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia. She was the only forced labourer on the farm and suffered greatly from the hard labour there. Her desperation was only increased when she received a letter from relatives telling her that her mother and sister had been murdered in Poland.
In an interview she gave to a historian in 1991, she described her ambivalent relationship with the couple who owned the farm:
"I liked the farmer a lot. Unlike his wife, he was a good and understanding person. His wife was a fanatical fascist who loved only cats – she had no children. I worked beyond my strength, although Gustav secretly helped me milk the cows – that was the hardest work for me."
Resistance
Shortly before Christmas 1943, Teofila Turska began, as she herself puts it, to “rebel”. She was able to get a transfer, and on 15 December 1943, was sent to the machine factory of Goetzewerke AG in Opladen. At first, she worked on a lathe. After an accident at work, in which she lost part of a finger, she worked as an interpreter in the factory. This afforded her a degree of freedom. Her language skills helped her to conceal her status as a Polish forced labourer and to avoid the discrimination that came with it:
"I spoke excellent German and we covered our sign, the letter P, with scarves or hid it under our coats. If I noticed a conductor on the tram looking at us for too long, I’d get cheeky and ask him, ‘What’s the time?’ or ‘How many stops to Cologne?"
Teofila Turska frequently travelled from Opladen to Cologne to visit Leonard Kedzierski, nicknamed Lolek, a Polish forced labourer she had met on the train and stayed in touch with. Through him, she came into contact with the Ensign Organisation, a resistance group of Polish non-commissioned officers. When Lolek was arrested, a photograph of Teofila was found on him. The Gestapo arrested her on 5 May 1944.
Torture and internment in a concentration camp
After her arrest, she was taken to the Gestapo prison at Brauweiler, where she was interrogated and tortured. She lost two teeth as a result of the brutal abuse she suffered at the hands of Gestapo officers. She was then taken to the Gestapo prison in the EL-DE building in Cologne, where she was held in solitary confinement for several weeks before being placed in a cell with more than 15 women at times. Teofila Turska left several inscriptions in the cells of the Gestapo prison in the EL-DE building.
At the end of September 1944, the Gestapo transferred her to the Messelager camp in Cologne-Duetz. From there she was deported first to an assembly camp in Berlin and then to the women’s and girls’ concentration camp Ravensbrück, where she was forced to do extremely hard work in various labour detachments. The SS closed the camp in 1944 because of an outbreak of typhus. Teofila Turska tried to escape, but was hit by a van on a country road. Wehrmacht soldiers sent her back and herded her and other prisoners into an overcrowded tent on the outskirts of Ravensbrück, where she was again forced to work.
End of the war
The war ended for Teofila Turska in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where she stayed until May 1945, helping former prisoners to organise themselves and caring for the sick. After a stay in a DP camp, she was finally able to return to Poland with a group of survivors on a Red Cross bus in September 1945. She studied at the Medical Academy in Gdánsk and worked as a nurse for many years.
Remembering the victims
In September 1991, Teofila Knorowska, accompanied by her daughter, came to Cologne as part of the City Visit Programme for former forced labourers, prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners. In an interview with the historian Werner Jung, she summarised:
"I give them [my memories] to you, my friends, as a gift and as thanks for inviting me. It is a great experience for me to return to the scene of my memories today. But my heart is full of joy that there are still people who remember, that there are young people who know no borders. There are human beings everywhere, and there is respect and friendship everywhere."
She laid flowers in the cells of the former Gestapo prison in memory of those who were murdered. Teofila Knorowska died in Sopot, Poland, on 5 February 2002.
