My Mom Claimed A Convent Of Nuns Kept Her Hidden From The Nazis. Learning The Truth Changed My Life.

I’m wedged in the back of a Toyota Corolla on the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland, next to Sister Honorata, an 83-year-old, five-foot-tall, extremely plump nun. We’re headed to a small town a few hours away. After endless traffic snarls, we turn onto a highway. The sister driving us turns up the volume of her Catholic pop tunes.
My mom, Joasia, had spent part of World War II hidden in a convent attached to an orphanage located in the town we are driving to. At 69, Mom asked me to find the sisters who’d cared for her. I’d emailed over a dozen Catholic churches and I’d searched for months, but only met dead ends.
I was about to give up when a friend introduced me to the editor of a Polish Catholic magazine. At his request, I asked Mom to describe the sister’s clothing. She said the nuns wore skirts and shirts, and sweaters when it was cold, and some covered their heads with scarfs –– no black or white head-to-toe habits. The editor matched Mom’s descriptions to the Imienia Jezus order. When he reached out to them, Sister Honorata, their archivist, confirmed her order had hidden a small Jewish girl during the war.
When I met Sister Honorata at the order’s headquarters yesterday, I felt hopeful. Sister wore a polyester cream shirt, black calf-length skirt and black Birkenstock-style sandals with white socks, similar to my mother’s description.
But I was still skeptical. Whenever Mom shared her memories with me, I would research them. Often, dates didn’t line up. Details differed. Also, 10 years ago, she’d searched in Poland for the sisters and couldn’t find them because she was looking in the wrong town.
Sister Honorata had been friends with the sister who’d cared for the little hidden girl, and who, until the day she died, worried about what happened to the child after the war.
“What was that sister’s name?” My voice cracked.
“Sister Kornelia,” Sister Honorata said, whispering as if someone was eavesdropping. “Joasia was always on her mind. They were more like mother and child.”
Hearing her say Mom’s name made my pulse gallop.
“But after the war, she was scared to talk about what happened. You could sense her fear,” she told me.
This did not surprise me. Nazi Germany imposed a death penalty in Poland for anyone who aided Jewish people.
Hours later, in the car, Sister Honorata points out a small chapel painted daffodil yellow. Greek pillars flank the front door. It’s not the steepled brick building I had expected. Beside it is an enormous, single-story wooden building, large enough to be a factory. It was a school the sisters converted to an orphanage during the war — the one Mom had described to me.
I gasp. Mom has a sharp mind and excellent recall abilities. She’s tough to beat at Scrabble. When she listens to a news item on the radio, she can replay it word for word. But sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are versions of events we’d rather forget or that we reconstruct in ways that are safest to remember. I wanted validation that the pictures Mom had painted of the orphanage from her memory were real, not imagined. I wanted evidence. Now that I’d see it, I worry I doubted her. I’m addicted to data and details. Once I unearth them, I want more.
Mom was 18 months old when her aunt and uncle were arrested about a mile from where I’m standing. They’d been taking care of her after her mother was killed. Her aunt and uncle were eventually sent to Auschwitz, but a month after their arrests, while they were being interrogated, they negotiated with a notorious SS officer to save my mother. That Nazi officer delivered her to a convent — possibly this very convent I am staring at.
Now, half a dozen sisters pop out of the yellow building and rush to the car, arms open. They hug Sister Honorata and peck our cheeks. Sister Zofia, Kornelia’s former companion, leads us to a neatly arranged table in the dining area set with white china and plates of cutlets and fried potatoes. “Eat! Eat!” the sisters all beg of me, just like my mom, piling seconds and thirds on my plate so I won’t go hungry like she did.
During the war, food was difficult to source, and the sisters could often only feed bread and water to the child they now think was my mother. The little Jewish girl didn’t live with the children in the orphanage. Instead, Kornelia mostly hid her in her room, upstairs, to protect her from the eyes of the SS officers who’d moved into a building on the property.
After lunch I open my laptop and pull up an old photo of my mother tucked into a stroller. It was captured a mile down the street where she lived before her aunt and uncle were arrested. Sister Zofia stares at the picture, then reaches into a cabinet. She pulls out a black-and-white photograph of a girl, three or four years old, with a full round face, chocolate eyes and black glossy hair with bangs cut in a straight line.
I stare, my heart drumming in my throat. “That’s my mother,” I stammer. I remember similar photos of me as a child. We line up Zofia’s photo next to my photo of Mom in the stroller. The nose, the dark eyes, her hair — they’re identical. There is no question: The child is the same.
Even though it is nighttime in my mother’s time zone, I phone her.
“Mom, I found your nuns! It’s them! Are you awake?”
Mom squeals, panting for breath, laughing hysterically. Then she breaks into sobs. I wait for her to compose herself before handing my phone to Sister Honorata. She tells Mom how Kornelia pined after her, worrying about what happened to her after the war. I feel Sister’s words in my hand as she holds it.
“You must come back to Poland to see us,’ Sister Honorata insists. “Come soon. Hurry, so I don’t die before you come!”
I wipe tears from my cheek, astonished that Mom’s memories line up. The black and white photos, the kind sisters — it’s all real.
Five months after hugging the sisters goodbye, I return to Poland with my mom. In the back of the car, I hear her voice trill as she and Sister Honorata — two cuddly “Polish mamas” — share a joke in Polish I can’t understand. I twist and see Sister laugh, her cheeks wobbling.
We pull into the convent’s driveway. Mom steps out of the car. Her eyes lock onto the former orphanage. The timber siding sags. Paint peelings dot rotted window frames like moss.
Mom presses her fingers to her chin. She stares at the paneled red entrance doors that dominate the façade, like a nose warning of dangerous odors. She is not ready to open them yet, or go in. I see her lips tremble, her usual cheer slipping.
Sister Honorata approaches and pulls her close, like a grandmother. “Joasia, Joasia,” she croons, gently and lovingly.
Over lunch, the sisters tell Mom they are pleased she has returned to them.
“We are your family,” Sister Zofia says.
Yes, I think. It is true Kornelia and the sisters replaced the two mothers who “abandoned” my mom. First, her mother, Irena, when she was killed. Then her aunt — Irena’s sister — after the police arrested her. Mom’s resilience germinated in this place. This is where the sisters tried to protect her from the war raging at their door.
Mom will later write in her diary that she feels at home here. After her aunt and uncle survived the camps, they adopted Mom and raised her as their own child. But to help her assimilate and start over in a new country, they dismissed her nightmares of men with guns and of hiding in dark rooms and showed no interest in her memories of the sisters. They wanted her to simply keep quiet and behave. They tried to convince her she’d imagined these things.
Returning here reaffirms Mom’s memories — and her sanity. But I have questioned Mom’s memories, too. Because I suspect her stories are sometimes fanciful, I always sift for historical fragments to verify. She told me that the day the Gestapo killed her mother, she was the only child to survive because the other mothers clasped children to their chests, but her mother, Irena, threw her on the floor. However, eye witnesses have described my mom as the only child present. I never tell Mom I don’t believe her, but my quest for the truth requires me to examine gaps and inconsistencies. It has created an awkwardness between us. A tension I do not want but don’t know how to erase.
After lunch, Mom bounds outside. I can hardly keep up with her.
A troupe of nuns follow her into the old orphanage building, laughing and hugging her. The hallway smells musty, the walls chipped and flaking. Doors off the wide hallway lead to classrooms. My mother heads for one and peeks in. “Nope,” she says. “I remember sitting on benches, but not here.”
I feel as if I am watching Mom move through time in an episode of “This is Your Life” as she pops in and out of rooms while Sister Zofia holds her hand.
In the very last room, rows of lidded desks face the windows. Mom points at rows of dark pews stacked against a wall. She beams, clasping her hands together at her chest.
The sisters tell us these pews were in the chapel when Mom was here, and they moved them to this building after they renovated the building.
Later, I follow the sisters into the chapel and watch Mom slide into a newer pew. As the sisters file in for afternoon prayers, their giggles drop to whispers. They stare at my mother, the little girl they’ve all heard about.
Sunlight through the window casts an eerie light on my mother. She looks something like an icon painting, as if gold leaf glitters across her tired eyes and drawn face. She switches between smiling and frowning, and I sense her vacillating between past and present.
I watch Mom listen to the sisters chant, their rhythm low, repetitious and soothing, like someone rubbing oil into stiff muscles. These are same mantras she heard here all of those years ago, morning, midday, and night. I picture her at three years old, hoisting herself onto a pew, scooting over to where Kornelia prayed. Outside, the world spun in violent chaos. Inside, there was kindness — a routine that anchored a little girl who’d lost everyone she loved.
When Mom first arrived at the convent, the sisters simply saw a sickly child in need of help, regardless of her ethnicity. They gifted her empathy and compassion. Now, in their presence, I understand why — despite Mom’s emotional scars from war — she is always thinking of others and planning kind acts. She seeks out people who are hurting and invites them for coffee. She delivers them casseroles. She picks up their children from school.
Sitting on the other side of the aisle, I realize my tendency to envisage Mom as still the vulnerable child. I underestimate her courage. My mom is scared of nothing. She is willing to take risks. She always looks for ways to turn things around for the better.
Piecing together my mother’s past, I know now the world isn’t straightforward, good versus evil. The stories we tell aren’t always truthful, but they help us survive our pasts — and truth, if we find it, can be ugly. Instead of doubting Mom’s memories, I should listen more. I think I know better, with all my digging in archives and talking to historians. I thought I could fix her pain. I believed I could solve it for her, as though she were a problem. It is arrogant of me to view her this way.
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Yet, relief sweeps through me, too. Mom and I have grown closer on this journey — me, guiding her through her past; she, understanding why I sometimes doubt her stories, teaching me that logic and my affinity for facts matter less than her ability to forgive those who wronged her. Forgiveness enables her to help others.
I’d searched for the sisters for months. I agreed to accompany Mom to Poland so she could reassemble and reconcile the memories that have haunted her for years. I know Mom is at home here. She has finally reclaimed the part of herself that has been missing for decades — life-changing for her, but also for me. Learning how my mother endured and recovered from war has swept away any awkwardness between us, despite the unreliability of reconstructed memories. It has allowed me, for the first time, to know who she really is and truly see her. I am thankful for that, and for how our relationship has grown because of it — and so is she.
Karen Kirsten is the author of “Irena’s Gift: An Epic WWII Memoir of Sisters, Secrets, and Survival.” Her essay “Searching for the Nazi Who Saved My Mother’s Life” was selected by Narratively as one of their Best Ever stories and nominated for The Best American Essays. Her writing has also appeared in Salon, The Week, The Jerusalem Post, Boston’s NPR, The Boston Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Christian Post and more.
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