At dawn on September 1, 1939, German armored columns crossed the Polish border from the north, west, and south simultaneously. Britain and France, having guaranteed Polish sovereignty, prepared ultimatums that would become declarations of war within two days. In Warsaw, streets filled with civilians staring at the sky. Across the country, men reported to mobilization points and women began packing what could be carried.
In Siedlce, east of Warsaw, a sixteen-year-old girl heard the news with the rest of her countrymen. Her name was Blanka Kaczorowska, and within two years she would join the Polish resistance, receive a bravery medal from General Stefan Rowecki, the commander of the Home Army, and within three years she would hand him over to the Gestapo. Blanka Kaczorowska was born on October 13, 1922, in Brześć Litewski, now Brest in Belarus, then part of the Polish Republic. Her father, Jan Kaczorowski, came from a noble family of the Husiatyn settlement in Podolia.
He studied at St. Petersburg Technical University, volunteered in the Russian army during World War I, and after the war joined the newly independent Polish state, rising through the military judiciary until qualifying in 1931 as an investigating judge. Between 1934 and 1938, he presided over the local military court in Siedlce. The family was respected, patriotic, and well connected within prewar Polish state institutions.
Blanka grew up in that environment. She attended the Military Family Association school in Warsaw, then Queen Jadwiga Secondary School for Natural Sciences 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 finished her final school examinations.
She was sixteen. The German occupation divided Poland into various administrative zones. Siedlce fell within the General Government, the German colonial administration established over central and southern occupied Poland. Under occupation, secret resistance organizations formed quickly, drawing on prewar civil society and military structures.
Early in 1940, Kaczorowska came into contact with the underground 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, then as a cleaning woman in a German military hospital, positions that gave her access to valuable intelligence. During this period, she attracted the attention of a German Luftwaffe officer named Johannes Barand, and her resistance superiors encouraged her to exploit that connection as a source of information. In November 1941, the Gestapo arrested her in Siedlce.
They confiscated incriminating materials, 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 by order of General Rowecki, the man she would later betray. At the ceremony where she received her medal, she met for the first time Ludwik Kalkstein, the man who would destroy her.
Kalkstein was a Home Army intelligence officer leading a network called Group H. He received his own medal at the same ceremony. In early 1941 or 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 Street 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 on condition of working for the Germans, and she expressed 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 resistance 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 was assigned, the identities of her organizational contacts.
That information passed through Kalkstein to the Gestapo, where she was registered as agent V-98. Kalkstein carried the number V-97. The third member of that network, Kalkstein’s brother-in-law Eugeniusz Świerczewski, worked under V-100. The consequences for the Polish resistance were severe.
Kaczorowska later admitted in her postwar 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 Home Army headquarters. She used that 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 Karaśiewiczówna, head of the propaganda and morale section of the Bureau of Studies and Kaczorowska’s direct superior. But the most serious act of betrayal had occurred months earlier. On June 30, 1943, General Stefan Rowecki, commander of the Home Army, was arrested in 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, identified as the man who had located Rowecki on the street and informed the Germans, in June 1944. An execution 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; 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 went to the newly liberated city of Łódź.
Probably in February 1945, Kaczorowska left Łódź for her last prewar residence, Siedlce, to obtain official documents. At the local municipal office, she obtained the necessary document under her maiden name. At the same time, she did not hide the fact of her marriage. Her father, Jan Kaczorowska, the prewar military judge, had by then been recruited by the new communist authorities and appointed a judge on the Supreme Military Court in Lublin.
That position, held by one of the senior judicial figures of the new state apparatus, provided Blanka with a degree of protection she exploited fully in the turbulent early postwar years in Poland. She settled in Łódź and obtained her secondary school completion certificate in July 1945 after finishing 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 she was married but did not give her husband’s family name.
At the university, she was not a distinguished student, caused no problems, and graduated with a clear record 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 with him a commentary on the postwar military penal code. She moved in with him and presented him as her husband, though they were never formally married. During the late 1940s, Kaczorowska lived a quiet life in Łódź, then later in 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 that did not last. The political climate in Poland was changing.
The Stalinist tightening of communist control in the early 1950s brought intensive scrutiny of wartime records and renewed interest in former Gestapo collaborators. The network of protection around 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, claiming she had trusted Kalkstein, denying direct collaboration with the Gestapo, and insisting 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 punishing Hitlerite fascist criminals.
The court convicted her and sentenced her to life imprisonment and 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 at Fordon, near Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, and was released on parole in July 1958, after five and a half years of detention.
In prison, she became an informant for the communist security apparatus, reporting on fellow inmates. After release, she continued that role, working as a secret agent under the code name 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.
After release, he left Poland and eventually moved to France, where their son lived. 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-aux-Bailly in the Loire Valley, which had cared since 1957 for veterans of the Polish armed forces in the West and political refugees. She was recognized there by chance when a Polish woman working in the administration found her French residence card, which described her as a victim of political persecution in communist Poland.
Her wartime past soon came to light. She lost her job, and after reaching retirement age, Kaczorowska was transferred to a French care home in Beaujency, north-central France, where she spent the rest of her life. Blanka Kaczorowska, a woman who perhaps did worse than the Nazis themselves by betraying her homeland twice, died on August 25, 2002, at the age of seventy-nine, in a hospital run by the Camillian fathers in Brie-sur-Marne, a suburb east of Paris.
She was buried in the local municipal cemetery.