On September 1, 1939, German columns crossed into Poland from the north, west, and south at dawn. In Warsaw, civilians filled the streets and stared at the sky. Men reported to mobilization points, and women began packing what they could carry.
In the city of Siedlce, east of Warsaw, a sixteen-year-old girl heard the news with the rest of her countrymen. She was the daughter of a military judge. Within two years, she would join the Polish resistance and be decorated for bravery by General Stefan Rowecki, commander of the Home Army, the largest underground organization in occupied Poland.
Within three years, she would hand him over to the Gestapo. Her name was Blanka Kaczorowska.
Kaczorowska was born on October 13, 1922, in Brześć Litewski, then part of the Polish Republic and now known as Brest in Belarus. Her father, Jan Kaczorowski, came from a noble family in the Podolia region. He had studied at St.
Petersburg Technical University, served in the Russian army during World War I, and after the war joined the newly independent Polish state, rising through the military legal system until qualifying as an investigative judge in 1931. Between 1934 and 1938, he presided over the local military court in Siedlce. The family was respected, patriotic, and well connected within pre-war Polish state institutions.
Blanka grew up in this environment. She attended a school run by the Military Family Association in Warsaw and later the Queen Jadwiga Secondary School in Siedlce. She was a member of the Polish Scouting Association, which instilled in her early values of patriotism and organizational discipline.
When war broke out, she had not yet completed her final school examinations.
The German occupation divided Poland into different administrative zones. Siedlce fell within the General Government, the German colonial administration established over central and southern occupied Poland. Underground resistance organizations formed quickly, drawing on pre-war civil society and military structures.
By early 1940, Kaczorowska was in contact with the resistance and joined the structures of the Union of Armed Struggle, the predecessor of the Home Army. She worked in the kitchen of a German airfield and later as a cleaner in a German military hospital, positions that gave her access to intelligence of value.
During this period, she attracted the attention of a German Luftwaffe officer named Johannes Barand. Her resistance superiors encouraged her to exploit this contact as a source of information. In November 1941, the Gestapo arrested her in Siedlce.
Incriminating materials were confiscated, including private letters from Barand. She was released after a few days, explaining to the resistance that she had convinced the Germans the materials were found by accident while cleaning. The underground accepted this explanation and awarded her the Cross of Valor.
Ironically, the decoration was approved by General Rowecki, the man she would later betray.
At the ceremony for the award, she met Ludwik Kalkstein for the first time. Kalkstein was an intelligence officer in the Home Army, leading a network known as Group H. He received his own decoration at the same ceremony.
In early 1942, she joined his group. He became her superior in the underground, and their relationship quickly deepened.
In late March or early April 1942, the Gestapo arrested Kalkstein and held him at their headquarters on Szucha Avenue in Warsaw. He broke under interrogation and agreed to cooperate. After his release in August 1942, he changed his appearance and searched for Kaczorowska, finding her a month later.
He told her openly that he had been released in exchange for agreeing to work for the Germans. She raised no objection.
On November 14, 1942, they married in a church in Radość, a suburb of eastern Warsaw. The marriage was kept secret from the resistance. Kaczorowska continued working in underground organizations under her maiden name and maintained a separate address from her husband so their connection would not be discovered.
In secret meetings with Kalkstein, she told him everything: the names of the people she worked with, the tasks she had been assigned, and the identities of her organizational contacts. This information passed through Kalkstein to the Gestapo, where she was registered as agent V-98. Kalkstein was V-97.
The third member of the network, Kalkstein's brother-in-law Eugeniusz Świerczewski, operated under number V-100.
The consequences for the Polish resistance were severe. Kaczorowska later admitted in her post-war testimony that she knew the information she passed to her husband reached the Gestapo. In the summer of 1943, her capacity for damage increased when she was assigned to the main headquarters of the Home Army.
She used this position to obtain information for the Gestapo. In December 1943, information she provided directly led to the arrest of at least fourteen resistance members, five of whom were later executed. Among the dead was Jadwiga Karaśiewicz, head of the propaganda and morale section in the Bureau of Studies and Kaczorowska's direct superior.
But the most dangerous act of betrayal had occurred months earlier. On June 30, 1943, General Stefan Rowecki, commander of the Home Army, was arrested at his safe house in Warsaw and later executed. After an investigation lasting several months, Home Army counterintelligence concluded that three agents — Kalkstein, Kaczorowska, and Świerczewski — bore collective responsibility.
According to some sources, a secret military court sentenced all three to death in absentia. The sentence was carried out on Świerczewski, who was identified as the man who had pinpointed Rowecki's location in the street and informed the Germans, in June 1944.
An assassination squad went looking for Kalkstein and Kaczorowska at their apartment on Śniadeckich Street in Warsaw but failed. Kaczorowska, then pregnant, had taken refuge in a hospital under German protection. She gave birth to a son, and in April 1944, Kalkstein moved her to the town of Piastów outside Warsaw.
The marriage did not last, and the couple separated shortly after the birth of their son. The death sentence was never carried out, and Kaczorowska survived the following months under German protection.
In January 1945, with Soviet forces approaching and German occupation structures collapsing, Kaczorowska and Kalkstein moved to the newly liberated city of Łódź. In February 1945, Kaczorowska left Łódź for her last pre-war place of residence, Siedlce, to obtain official documents. At the local municipal office, she received the necessary document under her maiden name.
At the same time, she did not hide the fact of her marriage.
Her father, Jan Kaczorowski, the pre-war military judge, had by then been conscripted by the new communist authorities and appointed a judge on the Supreme Military Court in Lublin. This position, held by a senior judicial figure in the new state apparatus, provided Blanka with a degree of protection that she exploited fully in the turbulent early post-war years. She settled in Łódź and obtained her secondary school completion certificate in July 1945 after completing her interrupted education in an intensive course.
On October 31, 1945, she enrolled in the art history department at the University of Łódź. In her application, she stated that she was married but did not mention her husband's surname. At university, she was not a distinguished student and caused no problems, graduating with a clear assessment of good conduct.
She also entered into a relationship with Roman Vogel, also known as Roman Rawicz, a military judge who served in the same section of the Supreme Military Court as her father and co-authored a commentary on the post-war military penal code. She moved in with him and presented him as her husband, although they were never formally married.
During the late 1940s, Kaczorowska lived a quiet life in Łódź and later Warsaw, where she completed her university studies. In 1949, she found work at the State Institute for the Study of Folk Art in Warsaw. On the surface, she had completely reinvented herself.
But it did not last.
The political climate in Poland was changing. The tightening of Stalinist communist control in the early 1950s brought intense scrutiny of wartime records and renewed interest in former Gestapo collaborators. The network of protection surrounding Kaczorowska began to erode.
Her father was discharged from military service in April 1948, and her partner Vogel came under increasing political pressure. In late December 1952, she was arrested. Her apartment was searched, and a formal investigation was opened against her.
She gave lengthy testimony describing her wartime activities in detail, attempting to minimize her personal responsibility. She claimed she had trusted Kalkstein, denied direct collaboration with the Gestapo, and insisted she had only spoken to her husband about her work. On June 12, 1953, she was tried before the Warsaw Regional Court.
The charge was collaboration with the Nazi occupation under the decree of August 31, 1944, on the punishment of Hitlerite fascist criminals. The court convicted her and sentenced her to life imprisonment with permanent deprivation of civil rights. On appeal, the Supreme Court reduced the sentence to fifteen years with ten years' deprivation of civil rights.
A judicial pardon then reduced this to twelve years.
She served her sentence in the women's prison in Fordon, near Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, and was released on parole in July 1958, after five and a half years of imprisonment. In prison, she became an informer for the communist security apparatus, reporting on her fellow inmates. After her release, she continued this role, working as a secret agent under the codename Katarzyna.
In 1968, she legally left Poland for Paris, where she initially worked on small art history projects, then as a caregiver and hotel receptionist. Her former husband, Ludwik Kalkstein, was arrested after the war and sentenced to prison for his collaboration with the Germans. After his release, he left Poland and eventually moved to France, where their son was living.
Under a false identity, he spent the rest of his life in Western Europe and died in 1994.
In 1983, Kaczorowska was admitted to a Polish charitable care home in La Haye-en-Val in the Loire Valley, which since 1957 had cared for veterans of the Polish armed forces in the West and political refugees. She was identified there by chance when a Polish woman working in the administration found her French residence card, which described her as a victim of a political trial in communist Poland. Her wartime past quickly came to light.
She lost her job, and after reaching retirement age, Kaczorowska was transferred to a French care home in Bougy, north-central France, where she spent the rest of her life.
Blanka Kaczorowska, a woman who perhaps was worse than the Nazis themselves for betraying her country twice, died on August 25, 2002, at the age of seventy-nine, in a hospital run by the Camillian fathers in Bry-sur-Marne, a suburb east of Paris. She was buried in the local municipal cemetery.