BIOGRAPHY OF MITKA KALINSKI.

In Sparks, Nevada sits a modest house enclosed by a chain-link fence. It attracts little attention. For more than 50 years, it has been the home of Mitka and Adrienne Kalinski, two improbable lives whose destiny was shaped by one of Western civilization’s greatest crimes.

In 1959, Mitka and Adrienne moved from North Tonawanda, New York, to Sparks, where the young couple had heard there was year-round construction work. Mitka found work and, with it, the satisfaction of supporting his family. However, Mitka carried a secret. He kept memories of his childhood from his wife and children.

For Mitka, it was a day in 1981 that the horrors of his childhood came pouring out. And then, like a wildfire, his need to tell and retell his story could not be extinguished. From that day forward, Adrienne documented everything Mitka said. Then, painstakingly, the two of them followed every lead they could to validate Mitka’s memories and to find out who he was.

The story began at a Kinderheim in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, where a woman left Mitka. There, he joined other orphaned Jewish children. It was 1939. Hitler and his Nazi party were in the early stages of bringing death and destruction to Europe. For the next ten years, Mitka experienced the evil of Hitler’s terrifying reign.

In 1941, as bombs fell, Mitka ran away from the children’s home. Subsequently, German soldiers picked up the small boy, only five or six years old. For eighteen months, Mitka survived. Once, covered by bodies of just-executed Jews, he waited for silence to crawl out alive. Soon after, soldiers, again, picked Mitka up to put him on a cattle car. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the first stop. Over the next fifteen months, stays at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Pfaffenwald would follow. It was at Pfaffenwald where SA officer Gustav Dörr found Mitka and took him to Rotenburg an der Fulda as a household slave.

Mitka spent the next seven years at Dörr’s house and farm as a child slave, enduring beatings, eating the food he fed the animals, having neither shoes nor coat, and doing the work of grown men. Eventually, American soldiers freed Mitka in 1949 and took him to Bad Aibling, a compound for displaced children. It was there that Mitka learned to use a toothbrush, eat with utensils, and interact with others.

In 1951, he was sent to a synagogue community in New York followed shortly after by a move to Baltimore. Mitka did not know English, could not read or write, and had little idea of how to navigate his new world. He learned rudimentary English and how to make his way in America by watching movies.

A move to North Tonawanda followed, which began the courtship of Adrienne. Life was good. The post-war years proceeded with the common struggles and joys of an all-American blue-collar family.

But there was the secret. It all spilled out over a period of weeks in 1981 – weeks of terrifying nightmares for Mitka and confusion for his family. With his family, Mitka returned to Rotenburg in 1984 to confront his past and begin the process of finding his identity, earning his U.S. citizenship, and, finally, years later, experiencing his own Bar Mitzvah.

Today, Mitka and Adrienne live loving, happy lives surrounded by children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Mitka's story is being told in a book, to be published soon. For updates and more information, register here.