My grandmother, Helena Konopka nee Rothenberg

Helena (Malie) Konopka, formerly Lis, formerly Kozdon, nee Rothenberg.

(author’s Grandmother)

Baroness Helena Teresa Maria Anna Konopka was born Malie Rothenberg in 1902 in the town of Stryj, then part of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Ukraine). She was the second daughter of Pinkas Rothenberg and Feige Dwora Probst, and, like her older sister Róża (later known as Irena), her birth was recorded in the Jewish community registry of Stryj. The Rothenberg and Probst families were part of a well-established Jewish population in the region, many of whom had deep roots in nearby towns such as Skole and Drohobycz.

In March 2014, Helena’s granddaughter, Jennie Milne, began the search to uncover her grandparents’ histories. She wrote to the genealogy magazine Who Do You Think You Are?, seeking guidance. Her inquiry led to collaboration with Jewish genealogist Michael Tobias of Jewish Records Indexing – Poland (JRI-Poland), who successfully located both sisters’ birth records, solving the mystery of her mother’s background. Michael reconstructed an extensive family tree for the Probst lineage using his expertise. However, records for Helena’s father, Pinkas Rothenberg, were elusive for many years after - possibly lost during the upheavals of war or shifting borders and administrative changes in Galicia.

Malie - by then using the name Helena - converted to Catholicism in 1926 in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) in order to marry Gustaw Kożdoń. The marriage was short-lived, but her conversion may have proved key to her survival in later years under the Nazi Regime.

In 1933, Helena married her second husband, Stanisław Lis, a Polish army officer and government official based in Warsaw. With the outbreak of the Second World War and the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Stanisław was called up from the reserves and fought in the September Campaign. After being taken as a prisoner of war, he eventually escaped and undertook a harrowing journey through occupied Europe, finally arriving in the United Kingdom in 1941 and reuniting with Helena sometime after.

Helena is believed to have escaped alongside members of the Polish government-in-exile. A recently rediscovered passport reveals fragments of the treacherous route she took through Fascist- and Nazi-controlled territories. By 1940, she had successfully reached Britain, where she would live out the rest of her life under her adopted name and faith—her Jewish origins buried beneath layers of reinvention shaped by love, war, and survival.

In 1943, Helena joined the Polish Army under British Command and was stationed in Scotland as part of the Polish Women’s Auxiliary Service. That November, she was seconded to London, where she gave birth to her only child, Elizabeth Lis. Determined to remain in service and fearful that motherhood would force her discharge, Helena concealed the pregnancy from her superiors.

Roughly ten days after Elizabeth’s birth, Helena undertook a remarkable and desperate journey—traveling over 230 miles to Hope Cove in Devon to place her newborn daughter in a wartime baby home. There, she promised the staff that she would support her baby and return for her after the war. Days later, records show she had resumed her military duties in Scotland, where she rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant.

After the war, however, Helena was unable to locate her daughter. For over two decades, they remained separated - until 1964, when Elizabeth succeeded in tracing her birth mother. Their reunion was brief but deeply significant. During their time together, Helena shared fragments of her hidden past, including the devastating account of her brother’s murder by the Gestapo and the survival of her young nephew, who had endured a brutal beating by German forces.

Subsequent research confirmed some of these details. Helena’s brother, Henryk Rothenberg, was born in Stryj in 1912, and his birth was also recorded in the town’s Jewish registry. Although his life was cut short during the Holocaust, no further documentation of his fate or the circumstances of his murder has yet been found.

Helena and Elizabeth remained in touch for a short time, but in 1966, following a tragic misunderstanding, Elizabeth failed to meet her birth mother at a prearranged location and they lost contact. They were never to see each other again. The silence that followed marked the final chapter of a lifelong separation shaped by war, secrecy, and survival.

Over the course of her life, Helena married three times and changed her name multiple times, a reflection of the upheaval, reinvention, and survival that defined her journey. As the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in Stryj, she rose to the upper echelons of Polish society in the interwar period. But by her own account, when the Soviets invaded eastern Poland in 1939, "they took everything." The trauma of dispossession and the constant fear of being discovered by either the Russians or the Nazis haunted her for the rest of her life.

Following the Second World War, Helena married for a third time - this time to Baron Jan Konopka, adjutant to General Władysław Anders, commander of the Polish Armed Forces in the West. It was a union based on deep affection, and Helena shaved eleven years off her age to match Jan’s. After his premature death in 1968, Helena lived alone in the United Kingdom. She remained in contact with her sister Irena (Róża Rothenberg), who had emigrated to the United States, and with Irena’s son, James Russocki, Helena’s nephew.

James visited Helena in London on several occasions, bringing his daughters with him. His memoirs provide valuable insight into Helena’s early life in Poland, and they support much of the research into the Rothenberg-Probst family history. Helena and James shared a profound bond—one rooted in their shared past, cultural heritage, and the enduring scars of war and loss. Yet, tragically, it is believed that James never knew of his cousin Elizabeth, Helena’s only child, who had been placed in a wartime baby home and later lost contact.

In her final years, Helena lived in a Polish care home in Lincolnshire - astonishingly, just a fifteen-minute drive from the home of her granddaughter, Jennie Milne. Despite this extraordinary proximity, the two never met. Helena died in October 2000 at the remarkable age of 98, having concealed her true age for most of her life. Her death certificate lists her birth year as 1913 and her maiden name as Solomirecka - a name she had adopted decades earlier. Under those details, it would have been virtually impossible to trace her original identity as Malie Rothenberg.

To this day, discoveries about Helena’s life continue to emerge. Among the most poignant is the recent recovery of her battered wartime passport, which documents part of her flight from Nazi-occupied Europe. But perhaps the most moving revelation came with the discovery of a photograph - a portrait of Elizabeth, taken in the 1960s, found among Helena’s possessions after her death. It is a quiet, powerful testament that despite everything, Helena never forgot her daughter.

Her story has been painstakingly reconstructed through Elizabeth’s written notes and oral testimony, international archival records, family photographs, and shared memories contributed by her great-nieces, Sandy and Renata Russocki. What emerges is a life shaped by reinvention, resilience, and an unbreakable, if fractured, thread of memory.

For further information please contact Jennie Milne : jenniemilne67@gmail.com