Janina Krawczyk discovered this small Steiff teddy bear by the wayside near Eberswalde, after the death march. She assumed that it had been lost by a German child fleeing from the Red Army. Janina Krawczyk took the teddy bear with her to Warsaw – as a reminder of her liberation and the end of her imprisonment in a concentration camp in Germany.
Janina Krawczyk, born in 1909, lived with her parents and three younger brothers in Warsaw. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, triggering the Second World War, she was in the middle of training to become a teacher. During the occupation, she was conscripted into forced labor but continued her training in secret.
In the summer of 1944, she and her mother Jadwiga Krawczyk were taken prisoner after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. They were initially sent to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp via Groß-Rosen. Together with 650 other Polish women, they were transferred to Hennigsdorf (a subcamp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp) on October 6, 1944. Every day, they marched three kilometers from the subcamp to the AEG factory in Hennigsdorf. In rotating, twelve-hour shifts, the women assembled aircraft engines under the supervision of German civilian workers.
The subcamp was dissolved in April 1945. Janina Krawczyk and her mother were part of a small group of women that the SS drove towards Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Near Sommerfeld, they met a unit of Polish soldiers from the Red Army, which meant their liberation. Mother and daughter made their way to Warsaw on foot.
After working as a teacher for some time, Janina Krawczyk retrained as an accountant. She never received compensation for the forced labor she performed at AEG.
In 1995, Janina Krawczyk took part in the 50th anniversary of the liberation and donated several mementos of her concentration camp imprisonment to the memorial.
