Zielonka Henryk & Gertruda

ZIELONKA, GERTRUDA ZIELONKA, HENRYK Henryk Zielonka was a tailor and ran an underwear factory in Czestochowa. When he married Gertruda he was already a widower and had two sons from his previous marriage. In the summer of 1943, Henryk’s son brought home a five-year-old Jewish girl named Chana (later Chana Batista). Chana was born on the outskirts of Czestochowa, in Rakow. On June 16, 1943, Chana’s mother had taken her to the town. Once they were on a bridge, her mother gave her a piece of bread and jam along with a scrap of paper with an address written on it. Chana was told that at the said address she would find a woman who would help her. Her mother added that she should guard her bread because it was the last piece. As Chana began walking towards the location of the address, her mother jumped off the bridge and into the river. A passerby directed Chana, who was not able to read at the time, to her destination, where she waited for a few hours for the woman that her mother told her about. The woman wrote her a new note and took the girl to a church. She told her to wait for the priest and quickly disappeared herself. After mass, Chana turned to the priest and showed him the note. The priest said that he could not help her. He called in a boy and a girl and asked them to take Chana to an old people’s home run by nuns. In front of the home was a big courtyard; on the bench sat a few people. They started asking Chana questions, checking to see if she knew how to pray. Suddenly the girl noticed the boy coming down the stairs; it was Henryk Zielonka’s son. “How are you not ashamed to tire this girl with questions?” he asked. He took Chana by her arm and escorted her to his parents’ house. “I woke up the next day in a bed... A few days later my hostess threw out the rotten jam sandwich,” Chana recalled in her testimony to Yad Vashem. After some time, Henryk managed to get documents for Chana “proving” that she was his niece. On the other side of thedocument, he wrote down the date that Chana arrived at his home. “Shortly afterwards they told me to call them ‘mother’ and ‘father’... I was a difficult child, I almost didn’t speak, I did not smile and in addition, I didn’t want to eat. My poor mother did what she could to make sure that I would eat something... Mother was an excellent housekeeper and wanted me to become a normal child again. I wasn’t easy. She cooked spinach for me, because I had anemia.” After the war, Chana started school, finished her studies, and began working. When her adopted parents died, she developed an interest in her biological parents. She then discovered that her mother did not drown in the river but merely broke her leg. She had been taken to a hospital, from where the Germans transferred her, along with other Jews, to an unknown location where they were murdered. She also discovered that she had relatives living abroad; her mother’s sister and her father’s brother. She began corresponding with them and in 1971 she left Poland for Israel. On April 12, 1992, Yad Vashem recognized Henryk Zielonka and his wife, Gertruda Zielonka, as Righteous Among the Nations.