Waleria Rutkowska, also known as Józefa Malewicz, was officially born on 15 April 1929 in Kamieniec Litewski, Poland (now Kamyanyets, Belarus).1Waleria Rutkowska was registered at the Flossenbürg concentration camp using these dates of birth, and these dates also appear in her Polish documents from the period after 1945. No birth certificate has been preserved. This biographical account is largely based on her own recollections, recorded in 1994 when she was interviewed by the author. Information on the persecution of Waleria Rutkowska and her family was supplemented using documents preserved in the Arolsen Archives.2Using the documents in the Arolsen Archives, it has been possible to identify the parents, three sisters and three brothers. No information has been found regarding a fourth brother. The documents used are listed under ‘Archival Sources’.
Rutkowska was raised in a travelling Roma family; the birthplaces of members of the family indicate that they lived in the borderlands of Belarus, Lithuania and Poland, with Lida (now Belarus) and Kamieniec Litewski as places of residence. Her father Ignacy Rutkowski (1888–1944/45) traded horses, and her mother Aleksandra Rutkowska née Brylewicz (1893–1943) took care of the children. She had four brothers and three sisters, and one grandmother also lived with the family. Waleria Rutkowska’s testimony makes it difficult to establish her actual date and place of birth. She was registered in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp under the name ‘Josefa Malewicz’, born on 14 May 1929 in Lida, and of Polish nationality. Out of her entire family, only she and one older brother survived World War II.
Under Soviet and German Occupation
Waleria Rutkowska recalled fleeing westwards from Red Army soldiers after the Soviet Union annexed Eastern Poland from 17 September 1939 onwards. The family knew about the communist repression against travelling Roma and feared the establishment of Roma kolkhozes. They settled in Białystok, which was occupied by Germany in the course of the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.
Her father and brothers supported the Polish resistance and attended secret meetings, which she learned about through her brothers. In 1942, her brothers and her father failed to return from one of the meetings. At her mother’s request, she went to the meeting place to find out what had happened. Upon arrival, she saw uniformed Germans and was arrested. During interrogation, she said she had merely come there to play with a friend. When asked for her name, she gave the name of a deceased friend, Józefa Malewicz, in order to protect her family. She was then sent to the Bialystok prison. Conditions there were terrible; typhus was spreading, and food consisted of boiled beet leaves and some bread. Only later did she discover that her father and brothers were also being held there when she happened to see them in the prison courtyard.
In the autumn of 1942, they were transferred to Brest [Polish: Brześć], today in Belarus. As she remembered it, her transport of Polish Roma included more than 150 adults and children. Many Roma were held there, as well as German Sinti and Roma, who had arrived as part of another transport. In Brest, they were locked up in a two-storey wooden house surrounded by barbed wire.3From spring 1942 onwards, more than 950 Sinti and Roma, most of them German Sinti from East Prussia, were transferred from Bialystok prison to Brest prison. In early 1943, they were confined to the Brest ghetto. Holler, “Deadly Odyssey,” 106. The Polish Roma were confined in one room, while the others were imprisoned elsewhere. Waleria Rutkowska recalled being guarded by men in dark uniforms, ‘Schutzmänner’ and ‘Volksdeutsche’.
They were fed once a day, and typhus spread rapidly, claiming numerous lives. Both she and one of her brothers caught typhus, and she remained ill for almost seven weeks, becoming so weak that she was not forced to work in the forest as the other prisoners were.
She also vividly recalled the execution of a German woman, a mother of nine, who was kept hanging from a tree in the street for three days. As she did not understand German, she did not know why the woman had been executed. While in Brest, she started learning a few German words: ‘Brot’ [bread], ‘Wasser’ [water], ‘Schüssel’ [bowl], ‘Löffel’ [spoon].
Deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau
On 15 April 1944, Waleria Rutkowska, her father and her brothers Zygmunt (1921–2002) and Adolf Rutkowski (1925–1944/45) were loaded into cattle cars together with all the other Sinti and Roma incarcerated in the Brest ghetto and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were herded into a large hall, where they slept that night.
The next morning, men and women were separated for the registration procedure; a number was tattooed on their arms, their heads were shaved, and they were given camp clothing. All their jewellery and valuables were confiscated. She recalled that the people responsible for recording her belongings pretended to write the names of the owners next to the valuables. She also remembered the shame of being stripped naked and led to the baths.
She mentioned only briefly that she was brought to ‘brick blocks’ and also remembered being injected with various substances for so-called medical experiments. The inmates in Camp Section BIIe had to eat ‘like animals’ out of an enamelled bowl, without a spoon; the food was based on rye and coarsely cut turnips. She said that if someone hesitated before taking the food, they were shoved aside by others. She also clearly remembered the murder of Jews arriving by train.
In her barracks, there was a long brick stove running the entire length of the building next to the bunks. She recalled the wake-up calls and the roll calls, where she had to learn her number in German: ’zehn zwei und zweiundsiebzig’ [ten two and seventy-two – ‘Z-10272’]. Because of the ‘Z’ in her number, she said she was beaten numerous times.
During her incarceration in Auschwitz-Birkenau, she had to work, first digging turf with knives, often for meaningless tasks, and later pushing small wagons filled with soil and rocks along narrow iron tracks when the road to the crematorium was being built.
On 24 May 1944, her brothers Adolf and Zygmunt Rutkowski were deported to Flossenbürg concentration camp, where they were registered on 27 May 1944 under Nos. 10,400 and 10,401. Adolf Rutkowski died on an unknown date under unknown circumstances.
As Waleria Rutkowska had been separated from the rest of the family in 1942, she did not know what had happened to her mother and her other siblings. Her mother and her sisters Leokadia (1929–1943), Halina (1930–1943) and Feliksa (1937–1943) had also been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau a year earlier: They were registered there on 12 May 1943 as part of a transport from Szepietowo near Bialystok. As cases of typhus had been detected among these prisoners, her mother and sisters, like most of the deportees on this transport, were murdered in the gas chambers on 25 May 1943.
Her brother Mieczysław Rutkowski (1915–1943), who had been admitted to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 11 June 1943, was no longer alive by the time Waleria Rutkowska arrived at the camp. Eight days after his arrival, he was sent to the prison (‘Bunker’) in the Auschwitz main camp and shot at the ‘Death Wall’ on 26 June 1943.
Ravensbrück, Wolkenburg and Liberation
On 2 August 1944, Waleria Rutkowska was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp and registered there under No. 48813. The same day, her father was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp and from there to Mittelbau-Dora, where he perished.
Waleria Rutkowska said that she stayed only a short time in Ravensbrück before being taken ‘beyond Berlin’ to a large factory. She did not remember the name of the camp. According to the documents held in the Arolsen Archives, she was transferred around 22 August 1944 to the Wolkenburg satellite camp, which came under the authority of Flossenbürg from 1 September 1944. She was given prisoner No. 50048. The women had to work for the Berlin ‘Opta-Radio AG’, producing military equipment for the Luftwaffe.4Wolkenburg, KZ-Außenlager, in https://verortungen.de/tatorte/wolkenburg-kz-aussenlager [accessed: 22/07/2026]. As Waleria Rutkowska remembered, some people worked on big machines, probably lathes, while others checked electrical components. She herself worked on a large machine with two handles to test parts, the purpose of which she did not know. Because she was still weakened by typhus, she had to pretend she was working whenever a supervisor passed by.
In 1944, Allied bombings increased. At that time, according to her recollections, there were many women working in the factory. In addition to the Sinti and Roma, there were also women who had been deported during the Warsaw Uprising as well as Russian women. Early on the morning of 13 April 1945, the satellite camp was evacuated. The women had to walk, avoiding main roads and towns, mostly on dirt roads, and were escorted by armed guards who shot anyone too weak to continue. They were forced to carry large suitcases belonging to Germans; five women had to share one suitcase, taking turns carrying it. The march reached a small town whose name Rutkowska remembered as ‘Oberwald’, where they were loaded onto a train of cattle cars. The train first headed toward Flossenbürg, stopping in ‘Weiden in der Oberpfalz’, which is probably the place Waleria Rutkowska remembered as ‘Oberwald’. As Flossenbürg was already overcrowded, the Schutzstaffel (SS) officers in charge decided to divert the train to Dachau concentration camp.5Aas, Sinti und Roma im KZ Flossenbürg, 73–74.
On the way, the train was strafed by Allied planes. The Germans ducked under the wagons but left all the prisoners in the train. Later, at the request of a ‘Blockführer’ (SS guard), they were allowed to take shelter during air raids. However, some were then shot by Nazi guards. Two acts of murder are documented: On 20 April 1945, three Sinti or Roma women, and on 21 April 1945, two Polish women were shot because they had tried to escape.6Wolkenburg, KZ-Außenlager, in https://verortungen.de/tatorte/wolkenburg-kz-aussenlager [accessed: 22/07/2026]. Following the shootings, Waleria Rutkowska and four other women, two of them older, fled into the forest, toward the advancing Allied armies. They met a German farmer, told him they had been working in a factory and were fleeing the bombing, and hid on the farm for two days until American soldiers arrived.
After 1945
The women stayed on at the farm, working for the farmer and regaining their strength, before deciding to return to Poland. Among their group, there was a Polish Roma woman who spoke both Polish and German well and knew the route home to Poland. They travelled via Berlin and Warsaw before finally reaching Białystok. There, Rutkowska learned from friends that her mother and sisters had been taken away by the Nazis and deported ‘somewhere’. She managed to find only her brother Zygmunt Rutkowski, who stayed in Germany after 1945 and lived in Regensburg. Despite extensive efforts to trace her family, she never learned what had happened to her closest relatives before her death on 2 November 2002 in Bielsk Podlaski.
