Message
„Always focus on life and the other person.”
Alina Dąbrowska – maiden name Bartoszek, prisoner of five concentration camps: Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Malchow, Buchenwald, Leipzig, participant of two death marches. During the German occupation, Alina was involved in underground work. As a scout of the Gray Ranks, she gave lessons to middle school students secretly. She was employed in her hometown of Pabianice in the German arms factory Lohmannwerke which was from Bielefeld.
When she was 19 years old she was arrested on 13 May 1942 for conspiratorial work, i.e. for supplying armament documents to the Home Army organisation, for which the person in whose possession the materials were found was executed in Auschwitz. Alina Dabrowska was imprisoned for a year in a prison in Łódź. In June 1943 she was taken to Auschwitz. In January 1945, before the liberation of the camp, she was part of the Death March together with other Auschwitz prisoners and deported deep into Germany.
In April 1945, during the second Death March, she escaped from the transport and returned to Poland to Pabianice on May 11, 1945. She completed her education and passed her high school diploma. Alina began working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the same time studied and received a master’s degree in international law.
She has many interests. One of them is foreign languages. She knows 6. She has worked all her life in the same institution and often participated in world ranking events. Alina is still active, committed to the idea of spreading the truth about Auschwitz. Her talks about those times are without hate speech. As a witness to history, she has met pupils and students in Poland and she travelled to Germany to meet with German youth. She takes part in meetings of former concentration camp prisoners.