Story behind Bradford’s ‘Polish Anna’ led to huge recognition for late Nazi survivor
Telegraph & Argus community content editor Emma Clayton reveals how her tale of one of the city’s mysterious figures prompted massive response…
Like many people who grew up in Bradford, I was familiar with the woman known as ‘Polish Anna’.
As a child I used to see her singing in the city’s markets, in her deep, booming voice. She was quite a sight, in her woolly hat and over-sized jacket, an assortment of badges pinned onto the lapels. She carried a large stick, which she would shake at anyone who got in her way.
Everyone knew Polish Anna, or ‘Old Anna’ as she was also called, but no-one really knew who she was or where she came from. She’d arrived in Bradford as a refugee after the war, and there were rumours that she’d been a victim of barbaric Nazi experiments, but she was largely a mystery.
The Telegraph & Argus has a remarkable set of photographs, given to us by a man who found them dumped near a skip outside Anna’s house after her death in 1985. The images reveal Anna’s earlier life — one shows her with a group of farm workers in her rural homeland. Another photo is of her identity card, thought to be from a German labour camp.
In September I ran these photographs in a T&A spread on Anna, and asked for readers’ memories of her. It sparked a huge response. Within two days the story had 20,000 page views — and hundreds of comments on the T&A website and social media.
The response was overwhelmingly positive, with readers even thanking me for highlighting Anna’s ‘story’. Memories came flooding in — from people who, like me, remembered Anna singing in Bradford’s markets, in return for cups of tea and pieces of fruit from traders, to people who’d worked with her in local mills. Some readers from Bradford’s large Polish community recall stories from their parents, who lived with Anna in a Displaced Persons hostel after the war. Anna also lodged with some readers’ families in her early days in Bradford.
One man recalled how Bradford’s market traders had organised a collection to pay for Anna’s headstone when she died.
A reader contacted me from Germany to say that, prompted by the T&A article, he’d started researching Anna — whose full name was Aneila Torba — and had traced people with her family name to a little village in Poland,
After I ran a follow-up feature — sharing some of the many readers’ memories of Anna — I received an email from Stuart Dowell from the Polish Press Agency asking if he could use our photos of Anna for an article he was writing on how the T&A had unearthed more about her past.
His report made the front page of First News, the English language service of the Polish Press Agency, based in Warsaw, with the headline: ‘UK newspaper readers uncover extraordinary past of local woman known fondly as ‘Polish Anna’.
Writes Stuart: “Publishing a feature inviting readers to share their memories, the Telegraph & Argus newspaper in the city of Bradford, West Yorkshire, was quickly inundated with fond reminiscences.
“After the local newspaper published a series of photos inviting readers to share their memories of ‘Polish Anna’, no one expected it would set in motion a train of online sleuthing which revealed her shocking wartime ordeal as a slave labourer in Nazi Germany, and the destruction of her village in Poland as part of Hitler’s Lebensraum plan to exterminate Poles from the Zamość region.”
The article continues: “Some readers have established that people who share Aniela’s surname still live in Domostawa and have reached out to discover even more details about her life.”
Many readers’ memories and stories of Anna continue to come in, and I am hopeful that surviving members of her family will be traced in Poland.
Thanks to Telegraph & Argus readers, ‘Polish Anna’ has won long-overdue recognition in the country of her birth.
