Walentyna Janta-Połczyńska

Walentyna Stocker was born in Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv in Austria-Hungary to Ludwik Stocker and Karolina Kochanowska.[3] Her father, who was of English origin, worked in the mining industry and came from a family that prospected for oil in eastern Poland.[1] She had a brother, Andrzej, and a sister, Krystyna.[4]

She graduated from secondary school in Krosno.[5]

In 1938, Stocker travelled to London to study English and secretarial practice.[6] She was briefly married to a Polish navy officer, Wilhelm Pacewicz.[1]

On September 1, 1939, Stocker began working at the Polish embassy in London, soon after the German invasion of Poland in 1939.[7] In June 1940, when the Polish government-in-exile was set up, she became the personal secretary to General Wladyslaw Sikorski -- the prime minister in exile.[1][7] During meetings of the Polish cabinet with foreign leaders (including Winston Churchill), she acted as interpreter.[1] At the end of 1942, Stocker began working as an organizer and announcer for the secret Świt radio station, which had its headquarters at Bletchley, and broadcast to occupied Poland.[8]

In her role as translator, Stocker prepared intelligence briefs and typescripts from Jan Karski's reports.[9] Jan Karski, an underground investigator, delivered some of the earliest reports of German atrocities against the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. In a biography of Jan Karski entitled "Inferno," Waldemar Piasecki wrote that "with [Stocker's] language and professional qualifications, she was an invaluable acquisition."[1]

In April 1942, she was appointed to be the secretary of Władysław Anders for the duration of his stay in London.[6]

In July 1943, when General Sikorski died in a plane crash after a takeoff from Gibraltar, Stocker assisted in arranging his funeral arrangements.[1]

She also helped arrange the trips of specialized Polish soldiers who -- after training in Scotland -- were parachuted into occupied Poland to join the ranks of the Polish Home Army.[6]

In 1943, Stocker's brother was captured by the NKVD and sent to Siberia. Thereafter, he joined the Polish 2nd Corps under Wladyslaw Anders, which was deported to Iran.[6] Stocker's sister and nephew died during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Her mother and brother survived the war.[4] Her father died before the war began.[1]

In 1945, Stocker joined the Polish Army's Women's Auxiliary Service and went to Frankfurt, where she was given the rank of second lieutenant in the Polish army.[1] In Frankfurt, she worked as an interpreter aiding Polish prisoners of war and survivors of concentration camps.[8] She largely debriefed Polish former prisoners of war as well as concentration camp inmates who had been victims of medical experiments during World War II.[1] She took care of female prisoners who were subjected to inhuman medical experiments run by Nazis.[10] She served in the American-run part of Frankfurt from 1945-1946, where she met people to help get her mother from Poland to Germany, which was illegal.[6]

In 1946, Stocker and her mother emigrated to the United States, first settling in Buffalo, New York.[9][8] She first found employment with an office for the Polish diaspora in Manhattan, after which she worked for the cosmetics company of Helena Rubinstein.[6]

She married Aleksander Janta-Połczyński, a poet and journalist, in 1949. They met in London after he escaped German captivity.[1] They settled in Elmhurst, New York. Together with her husband, she established a bookstore in Manhattan, selling old books and maps of Poland.[8] This, along with their home, became a centre for émigré Polish culture in the United States.[1] They hosted, among others, Czesław Miłosz, Jerzy Giedroyc, Jan Karski, Marek Hłasko, and Zbigniew Herbert, as well as Charlie Chaplin, Vladimir Nabokov, Mahatma Gandhi, and Karol Szymanowski.[9]

From 1955 to 1958, Janta-Połczyńska worked for the Iraqi mission at the United Nations in New York City.[6] She was also active at the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America, a research organisation devoted to the study of modern Polish history.[1] Additionally, Ms. Janta-Połczyńska was active with the Kosciuszko Foundation -- the American Center of Polish Culture in Manhattan.

In 1958, Walentyna and Aleksander Janta-Połczyński assisted with a project that brought 35 former Polish prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp in Ravensbruck to the United States for mental health treatment for a period of six months.[6] They helped solve problems that emerged as these former Polish concentration camp inmates sought mental health treatment in the United States, where they had not been before.[6]

Between 1959–1961, Janta-Połczyńska worked successfully for the restoration of the Wawel Castle treasures (which had been evacuated at the start of the war) from Canada to Poland.[4]

After her husband's death in 1974,[4] Janta-Połczyńska started to look for a place where their archive could be compiled. In 1993, she began talking to representatives of the National Library of Poland.[8] Shortly thereafter, she donated much of their collections of maps, manuscripts, prints and historical documents to the Manuscript Department at the National Library of Poland in Warsaw.[9] Initially, this archive was only reserved for Dr. Franciszek Palowski, who was a researcher and expert in Aleksander Janta's work as well as a family friend.[8] In 1998, the National Library began organizing and repacking the archive. During that time period, Walentyna Janta-Połczyński continued to supplement her initial gift with new materials.[8]

In 2009, the National Library of Poland published a book of correspondence between Janta-Połczyńska and Jerzy Giedroyc.[8]

Walentyna Janta-Połczyńska died at the Forest Hills hospital on 2 April 2020 at 107 years old.[9]

• Medal of Merit for Polish Culture by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2011)[1]
• Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2014)[2]
• Jan Karski Eagle Award (2016)[9]