A Saint in Hell: Babcia Noncia, the Polish Romani Woman Who Saved Children from Nazi Germans

30-markowska-alfreda.jpg, default, Alfreda Markowska, photo: Mateusz Stefaniak / Fundacja Prom, A Saint in Hell: Babcia Noncia, the Polish Romani Woman Who Saved Children from Nazi Germans

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Living to the age of 94 and affectionately known in her later years as Babcia Noncia (Grandma Noncia), Alfreda Markowska’s WWII experience included being the sole survivor of a brutal German massacre against the Roma and being imprisoned in the Lublin and Łódź ghettos. Despite struggling for survival herself, she also risked her life to help save over 50 Jewish, Roma, Polish and German children – many destined for concentration camps.

Connected by heroic deeds

Obvious parallels with the well-recognised figure Irena Sendler – who helped save 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by hiding them within Polish families, in orphanages and monasteries – have led to frequent comparisons between her and Sendler as well as the acceptance of the commonly used title for Noncia as the ‘Romani Irena Sendler’.

Though less well-known than Sendler, Noncia’s heroic deeds were publicly recognised in 2006 when the Polish President awarded her the Commander's Cross with the star of the Order of Polonia Restituta, Poland’s second highest civilian honour for outstanding achievements and service, making her the first ever member of the Romani community to receive the award. However, it was only in her later years and since her death in January 2021 that her acts of courage have started becoming more widely known.

Her life story was also written down in the book Nie idź tam, Cyganeczko (Don’t Go There Gypsy), so titled because of a remarkable twist of fate and a neighbour’s warning that saved her life, which allowed her to go on to save the lives of others.

Not expecting to survive the war

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Alfreda Markowska during the unveiling of the monument to Bronisława 'Papusza' Wajs, Gorzów Wielkopolski, 2007, photo: Adam Borowy / Reporter / East News

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Noncia was born in 1926 in the area surrounding Stanisławów – today Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine and once part of Poland’s Eastern borderland – to a large travelling Polish-Roma tabor made up of several mobile carts and comprised of around 80 people. She was given the nickname Noncia while she was still a young girl. When WWII broke out in Poland and shortly after the German invasion when the Russian army invaded Poland from the east, the Roma began travelling west to flee the Red Army. Unfortunately, the Nazi Germans proved no less hostile to the Roma community. When Noncia’s tabor set up camp in the area around Poland’s Biała Podlaska, it was quickly noticed by the Germans, who surrounded the tabor and brutally murdered its inhabitants – leaving not a single person alive.

Fifteen at the time, Noncia had been out that morning in the local village fetching groceries when she was warned by a local peasant woman not to go back home and hid in her barn, an episode described by Halina Elżbieta Daszkiewicz in her book Nie idź tam, Cyganeczko (Don’t Go There, Gypsy), whose title was inspired by that life-defining event in which Noncia became the sole survivor of her large family. After the massacre, Noncia travelled to Rozwadów, today a district in Stalowa Wola, where a year later she met and married her husband – also a survivor of a German pogrom against the Roma community. Not long after, both were caught in a street roundup while visiting Stanisławów. They were handed her over to Germans, which led to their imprisonment in the Lublin and then Łódź ghettos.

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Alfreda Noncia Markowska with her daughter, photo: Daniel Adamski / AW

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Remarkably, they managed to escape both of the ghettos and return to Rozwadów, where they lived in a German organized labour camp for the Roma – working on the railroad line. The work they were engaged in allowed them to possess a special work permit enabling them to move freely as well as to leave the camp without fearing arrest. It was a freedom Noncia would come to exploit as this is where her story as a rescuer of children began.

Noncia risked her life saving the children as death was the punishment for anyone in Poland caught hiding Jews or ethnic minorities. Asked many years later why she hadn’t been afraid to help, Noncia said it was because she didn’t expect to survive the war herself.

A woman of deep faith, Noncia was also motivated by the feeling of a God-given mission. She later said she had felt that her miraculous survival as the only one of her tabor must have had a purpose, which was being spared by God in order to help save innocent children.

Hiding babies under her layers

Noncia’s main duty, assigned by the Germans, was to carry water to train wagons full of Jews and Roma who were being transported to German concentration camps – to give them something to drink before they continued onward. The men, meanwhile, were assigned the task of carrying out the bodies of anyone who had died by that point in the journey.

When walking through the wagons, Noncia would sometimes find a lone baby, which she was able to hide easily beneath the many layers of her traditional Roma dress. If the child was a bit older, she encouraged them to hold on to the bucket of water she was carrying and walk through the train with her while she tended to the thirsty prisoners before walking out of the train. With the child still holding on to the bucket, they would head back towards Rozwadów – all in daring full view of the Germans.

Cooperating with a group of trusted people, Noncia would then bring the children to a point prearranged by a chapel or a square. From there, the child would be picked up by a trustworthy individual who would take and place them with a trusted family.

Aside from saving children from the trains she worked on, Noncia would also voluntarily go to the sites of massacres. She went in order to look for surviving babies hidden in bushes or undergrowth, where she would often find them. She would sometimes even pull them out from beneath the bodies of their dead mothers or older siblings.

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Karol Parno Gierlinski, Lipiny, photo: Adam Tuchliński / Forum

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Altogether, over the course of the war, it is estimated that Noncia saved at least 50 children, though the actual figure may have been higher. She saved children who were Jewish, Roma and also some who were Polish. In some cases, instead of giving the children away, she would bring them home and they would be brought up for a time alongside her own children. This resulted in her working to support a household of over a dozen people at times.

One example of a child whose life Noncia saved was artist, sculptor and poet Karol Parno Gierliński, who was just three years old when Noncia took him into her care after his mother, who had been on a wagon bound for Auschwitz, gave him to Noncia when her train briefly stopped in Rozwadów. Bringing Karol back to her own home, Noncia discovered an address sewn into his clothes. She asked someone to write a letter for her and managed to reach the boy’s relatives, who came to collect him. After the war, he frequented Noncia and her husband. For the rest of his life, he proclaimed that Noncia was his second mother and that he was born again because of her.

In honour of her, many years later, Gerliński would create a Roma alphabet to help Roma children learn and develop, in this way, fulfilling the illiterate Noncia’s dream of seeing improvements in Roma children’s education.

After the war

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Alfred Noncia Markowska's mural on the wall of Primary School No. 1 in Gorzów Wielkopolski, photo: Stiopa / Wikimedia.org

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With the end of WWII in 1945, Noncia and her husband travelled to the west of Poland to settle in the country’s newly recovered territories. Noncia was helping children even on her journey there. While travelling through forested and rural areas, she encountered many lost, abandoned and hungry German children. She could not remain indifferent and helped bring these children to safety as well.

Noncia and her husband first settled in Poznań, where she travelled around and sold clothes and bales of material around the villages of Greater Poland. For a long time she didn’t speak of her wartime experiences or the children she had saved, only starting to do so when her daughters were grown women and had children of their own.

It was only when she was nearly 80 years old that Karol Gierliński, whom she had saved and Edward Dębicki, founder of Poland’s oldest international festival of Roma culture, began to take an interest in Noncia’s stories and set about collating them in order to assemble a case for her to receive an award in recognition of her actions. They managed to engage an ethnic minorities expert in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and work together to collect memories from 50 of the children Noncia had saved, which formed the basis for the Commander's Cross with the star of the Order of Polonia Restituta that she received in 2006.

After her husband’s death, Noncia would move to and spend the rest of her life in Gorzów Wielkopolski where her memory is best remembered and where most of her family were already living. In 2017, a mural of Noncia was unveiled on the wall of a primary school in the city, organised by the Związek Romów Polskich (Association of Polish Roma), with the inscription: ‘Alfreda Markowska, called the Romani Irena Sendler. An inhabitant of Gorzów’. The inscription also contained in it a quote which demonstrated her humanity and belief in treating children of all races and nationalities as equal: ‘Dear, what difference is it, Jewish or ours, they are children, aren’t they’.

Noncia was also honoured by a mural on the wall of a school in Warsaw’s Ochota district in 2016 and was one of the profiles featured in the documentary photography project RomaRising by Chad Evans Wyatt in 2014.

Written by Blanka Konopka, December 2021

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