Pen Pals Speak

MISSION VIEJO —  They never met. Their only communication was their letters, hers on a German-approved postcard; his on used, wrinkled envelopes he had gotten by bribing the guards at his POW camp.

Together, they became the best of pen pals, lifting each other’s spirits during World War II. After the war, Anna Trzeciak, now 72, who lives in Poland, thought that Zdzislaw (Dennis) Mrozik, 87, of Mission Viejo, who was captured as a lieutenant in the Polish army, had died.

But she wanted to travel to his grave, if only to light a candle.

“After all, here was a man whose parents had died at Auschwitz and he had suffered as an officer of the Polish army,” Trzeciak said through a Polish interpreter in a telephone interview Thursday.

She didn’t know where to find Mrozik’s final resting place. Years passed, but her search led nowhere. Then in 1993, she learned from the Red Cross that Mrozik was still alive and living in the United States.

The Red Cross, through the Social Security Administration, reached Mrozik’s daughter in Northern California, and she provided Mrozik’s telephone number in Orange County.

Fifty-two years later, after hoping at best to put flowers on his grave, Trzeciak telephoned Mrozik in California on March 4 and had a joyous reunion.

“I was so happy she could hear my voice,” Mrozik said. “She was, after all these years, like a phantom to me.”

For Trzeciak, their conversation provided solace. After all, they had helped one another survive the horror of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland.

“I was just so glad,” she said. “His letters have since perished, lost somewhere. But they were beautiful letters. He found out I was taking piano lessons and he wrote me some music notes, just dark dots he jotted down on these old envelopes of songs that he had heard in camp.”

During an interview, Mrozik retrieved old boxes of memorabilia he had saved through the years. Among the keepsakes were black and white photographs, tinged with age, of a young Mrozik in Polish uniform behind barbed wire at Offizierlager VII A, a POW camp in Murnau, near Munich.

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The war in Poland started Sept. 1, 1939. On Sept. 17, Mrozik’s horse-drawn artillery unit was easily overwhelmed by motorized German units and he was captured and taken to the Murnau camp, where he was squeezed into barracks with more than 5,000 other Polish army officers.

“Our treatment wasn’t bad, compared to civilian concentration camps,” he said. “But we were always hungry.”

When a package came with fresh-baked cookies and some kind words from a young lady he had never met, he accepted it eagerly. Trzeciak, who at the time was 17, said she wanted to do something positive for Polish army officers and picked his name at random from a list of POWs who didn’t have parents.

Mrozik’s parents, Vater Wladislaus and Anastasia Mrozik, who were Roman Catholics, were rounded up by the Germans along with Polish Jews and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they died.

Officially, Mrozik said, the Gestapo told him his father died of heart failure and his mother of an blood infection in an artery. After the war ended, he learned differently.

“I’ll tell you how they died and I got this because I talked to witnesses,” he said. “My father was punished and they made him run down two lines of inmates where they were forced by the guards to hit him with sticks. When it was done, he ran to his bunk and died there.”

His mother, he said, was seen walking through Auschwitz with a towel and a piece of soap. “She told someone in the camp, ‘I’m going to a shower.’ She never came back.”

Trzeciak said that after her first parcel was delivered, she began writing often. She recalled that the only way she and Mrozik could communicate at first was on the parcels, which were approved by German authorities.

Just making cookies was difficult, she recalled. Shortages prompted her to substitute lard for butter, but she sent the cookies anyway. Later, she would send bread, kasha, or crackers, home-made sausage and canned fish.

Mrozik wrote back thanking her on approved forms that allowed a writing space only about the size of one fourth of a regular postcard. “It wasn’t until he bribed a guard that he started sending normal letters,” she said.

But a four-year relationship developed, if only by mail. After the war, he lived in Germany, married, and later moved to the United States where he became a carpenter. He lived in Chicago and then moved to Orange County, where he has lived for 18 years. His first wife died and he is remarried.

Meanwhile, Trzeciak stayed in Poland and also married.

“When the war closed,” she said, “I knew I had to try and find him, even if to visit his grave.”