Mitka’s Secret: A True Story of Child Slavery and Surviving the Holocaust

Researcher Brallier, religious scholar Lohr, and Beck, dean at Pacific Lutheran University, present a moving account of the story of Mitka Kalinski, who survived seven years as a Nazi’s slave before building a life in America. Mitka fled Poland for Ukraine with relatives in 1939, only to be captured and sent to four concentration camps before turning seven. Unsurprisingly, the most harrowing and impactful scenes are from his time in the camps, particularly Mitka’s vivid memories of a stack of corpses and his thought that puppies—not fetuses—were being removed from women’s bellies. In 1942, he was selected to join the household of Gustav Dörr in Rotenburg, Germany to serve as a child laborer. Treated as a slave, Mitka was deprived of sleep and food, becoming so desperate that he’d sometimes sample the pigs’ slop before delivering it to their pen. After the war ended, he was sent to America, where despite being illiterate and not knowing English, Mitka found work and love, and fathered four children—keeping his past a secret until 1981, when the thought of dying spurred a desire to record his life’s history. Mitka’s remarkable story harrowingly demonstrates the horrors and personal repercussions of the Holocaust. (July)