She endured war, famine, loss of her way of life, and then rose up out of the ashes of misery and brought her family to a new and vastly different country, to thrive and flourish. She was a strong, magnificent woman, a force of nature and my mother.
She was the sixth of eight children born to Friedrich and Marta (nee Kaminski) Romanowski, with a childhood that was all too brief, cut tragically short by the onset of the Second World War. Her family had settled in and lived in East Prussia for some three hundred years. Her father was the Burgermeister and a dominant land owner in the region in and around Milau and Kalinovo. Anna’s memories of her early childhood years were always her fondest. Surrounded by friends and family and supported by a rural way of life close to nature, she explored and revelled all around her. Anna was a dedicated and ferocious learner. She attended a private boarding school in Saxony to take advantage of her precociousness and love of education. But, the war cut her education short. But she never stopped learning. In 1995 she achieved her high school equivalency just in time to retire.
The second world war was the most defining event in Anna’s life. In early 1945, a stable and productive way of life was destroyed, as the Red Army took revenge against it’s historical enemy, and Anna’s family fled to West Germany, becoming refugees facing starvation and deprivation. Those who remained were never heard from again. Her mother shepherded her brood of six children across Germany, dodging soldiers and privation, telling her children “the only soldier you can trust is a dead one”. Her father was captured by the Soviets and only returned after years of abuse and slavery in the early 1950s, in time to die a premature death. The misery that Anna and her family faced in the early years after the war defined her.
In the late 1940s Anna left Germany, emigrating to England to attempt to rebuild her life. It was where she met my father, Henryk. He too was a refugee from the war. He was a Polish Jew whose entire family was murdered in July of 1941 when operation Barbarossa was implemented by the Nazis. He hid for a year before he was captured wearing a found Polish uniform and put in a concentration camp, enduring horrible abuse as a slave labourer. In the late months of 1944 he escaped, joined the advancing Allies, and after the war was stationed in England where happenstance brought Anna and Henryk together. Theirs was an unlikely pairing. His Yiddish based German allowed them to communicate and in November of 1951 they were married.
In 1954 Anna, Henryk and I emigrated to Canada. Anna’s eldest brother Richard found a sponsor, Noble Lovering, in Coldwater, Ontario to help us come to Canada. Anna and Henryk were ever grateful to Mr. Lovering and he remained a close friend of our family until his death in the late 1960s. After a stay of five years in Toronto, city life though it agreed with my father, did not for Anna. They had scraped and scrounged the downpayment for a house in Victoria Harbour, some 100 miles north of Toronto and in a rural setting which suited her better. The 1500 dollar cost seems ludicrous for a house in these times, but for a young couple of refugees it was all they could afford, and it was theirs. More a shack than a house, they immediately set out fixing, repairing and upgrading their new abode, my father found work in nearby Midland working in the Ernst Leitz factory, and within a few years Victoria Harbour was our permanent home. In 1960 my brother Andy was born. In 1968 my father and I build a new modern home and in a flash we had integrated into Canadian Society.
But tragedy followed Anna. Andy, an elite hockey player and scouting prospect, was also concussed by the game. He fell into substance abuse and took his own life in 2003. It was blow from which she never fully recovered. Henryk died less than two years later and our small family dwindled even further.
With little to keep her in Ontario, in 2014 Anna sold her home and moved to Halifax to be closer with me and my wife Susan. It was a fortuitous step for us all. She lived in her own apartment and drove herself around her new found home until a year ago. Last year she gave up her licence to drive and began to consider independent living in Parkland. She had only been in Parkland for three weeks when she died.
Anna is survived by her son Richard and his wife Susan, grandchildren Shawn and BJ, and great grandchildren Aaron, Cole and Robin, and her brother Adolf and sister Elfrieda.
Anna has chosen to donate her body to science and participate in the Dalhousie Human Body Donation Program. A memorial will be held in Victoria Harbour, COVID permitting later this year, where her ashes will laid to rest beside Henryk and Andy. In lieu of flowers it is Anna’s wish that a donation can be made to the Dalhousie Human Body Donation program. Information can be found at dal.ca/bodydonation.
Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.JASnowFuneralHome.com for the Zurawski family.
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