KÄMPFERINNEN*
Polish Women in the Resistance in Berlin
Research Project by Anna Krenz

Method

These women's stories were not written by themselves. They were recorded by the apparatus that sought to destroy them — in Volksgerichtshof and Reichskriegsgericht verdicts, Gestapo files, camp registers. I reconstruct their biographies by cross-referencing these German judicial and archival documents (Arolsen Archives, Bundesarchiv, Gedenkstätte Plötzensee) with the few surviving traces in Polish and German memoir literature, postwar witness testimonies, and family materials I sometimes manage to access. It is detective work: one name in a verdict leads to another verdict, one pseudonym to another account, one arrest date to an entire network of connections — and, increasingly, from one network to its neighbour, since these organisations often shared people, apartments, and fates without sharing an ideology.

I hold to a principle of critical source reading throughout. Nazi verdicts, while invaluable as source material, are documents of judicial propaganda — written to the dictate of an apparatus with its own interest in portraying these women as "fanatical Poles," and which often reconstructed the structure of the Polish underground incorrectly, based on testimony extracted under torture. I treat them as a starting point, not as final truth.

I apply the Spiral Model — my own urban theory, developed since 2002, based on four dimensions (XYZ and time). Unlike circular or linear models, the Spiral Model treats spatial and historical development as spiral: layered, non-continuous, rooted in history, allowing for interruption and return. Within this framework I define a HERSTORY dimension — recovering marginalised voices, including women's, as part of bottom-up planning — and a HERITAGE dimension, treating memory and heritage as layered, cyclical structures rather than linear ones. Kämpferinnen* is a direct application of these two dimensions to a specific city: I read Berlin as a space where the layers of Polish resistance history — across its several, often intersecting networks — have been covered over, and through mapping, archival research, and urban interventions I restore their visibility. I apply the same theory in the project "Mehr als Namen — Frauenräume schaffen".

Protagonists

At the center of the project are women connected to Polish resistance networks in Berlin, first among them the "Stragan" network's Berlin cell: Jadwiga Neumann, Helena Maćkowiak, Stefania Jung-Mochnacka, Maria Gąszczak, Marta Rachel, and other couriers and liaisons whose names I am still recovering from the archives. Their stories intertwine in one city, in a handful of apartments, in a short, intense span of time between 1939 and 1944 — stories of courage, of decisions made under conditions of extreme danger, of invisible work that carried very concrete, fatal consequences. As the project grows, I am extending this research to women connected to the Związek Jaszczurczy's western intelligence outpost and other, less documented structures active in the same city, in the same years, often crossing paths with one another.

Around them, I also reconstruct the men of the same networks, liaisons, couriers, commanders, not because they are the subject of the project, but because the role of the women within it cannot be fully understood without understanding the whole structure. Some of these figures, such as Emanuel Prower and Zygmunt Witczak, were blank spots, absent from Polish and German historiography; I have managed to reconstruct outlines of their biographies.

Why It Matters

History is written from the perspective of the victors, mostly men. Polish women connected to the resistance in Berlin have been erased twice over: as women, and as subjects from an occupied country. In German memory culture, their presence is reduced almost entirely to the role of victim, to the biological fact of death. They are a name on a list of the executed, a card in a registry, without the story of their courage, of who they were and what they did. Kämpferinnen* is an attempt to reclaim these biographies from the hands of the apparatus of repression, of neocolonial memory practices and to restore their own history to them.

Exhibitions

2024 “Freiheit, Gleichheit, Solidarność”, Freifläche, im Berlin Global Ausstellung, Humboldtforum, Berlin, Germany

2023 “NENIA”, Rusałka Festival, Barak Kultury, Poznań, Poland

2022 „Fahlende Hälfte der Geschichte. Irena Bobowska, die Vergessene Heldin”, Regenbogenfabrik; Volkspark Friedrichshain; Kulturkirche Nikodemus; Friedhof Aliglienicke, Berlin, Germany

Lectures

On October 10, 2026, the Kämpferinnen* conference will take place, at which I will present a keynote based on this project, alongside panels devoted to the history of women in the resistance and the politics of memory. It is accompanied by the Kämpferinnen* exhibition of portraits of women from Berlin's Polish resistance networks — and a series of three Kämpferinnen* lectures presenting the research findings to a wider public. Conference organised by Ambasada Polek e.V.
https://ambasadapolek.org/kaempferinnen/
https://berlinwarszawa.eu/event/lkaempferinnen-frauen-widerstand-und-erinnerung-in-transnationaler-perspektive/
The Kämpferinnen* conference, exhibition, and lecture series are funded by the Stiftung Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin, as part of the programme "Zwischen Berlin und Warschau – 35 Jahre Nachbarschaft.”
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Panel II – Rolle der Zivilgesellschaft und Erinnerungskultur
(The Role of Civil Society and Memory Culture);
23. Memorial Conference in Krzyżowa. Transformation and Dissent – Commemoration in Europe since 1989
08.-11. 4.2026, Internationale Begegnungsstätte Krzyżowa/Kreisau
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Lecture-performance: "Lebendige Erinnerung. Zwischen Abwesenheit und Handlungsfähigkeit" (Living Memory. Between Absence and Agency)
Series: Wofür Denkmäler heute? (Why monuments today?)
31.03, 18.00 | Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin
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Lecture: "Living Memory. Irena Bobowska, the Forgotten Heroine"
Conference: Formy zaangażowania kobiet w systemach autorytarnych i totalitarnych XX wieku – Polska na europejskim tle porównawczym (1919-1989) (Forms of Women’s Engagement in Authoritarian and Totalitarian Systems of the 20th Century – Poland in a Comparative European Context (1919–1989)
Instytut Pileckiego, Warsaw, 14-15.10.2025 More >>>
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Lecture: "Postkolonialer Ansatz zu den deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen und der Erinnerungskultur"
Panel: "Poland and Germany – Entangled history in Berlin"
With Hanna Radziejowska (head of the Berlin branch of the Pilecki Institute), Alfred Hagemann (head of the History of the Site Department at the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss), Anna Krenz (artist, co author of the Open Space “Liberty, Equality, Solidarność” at BERLIN GLOBAL), moderation: Emilia Smechowski (editor-in-chief at German ZEITmagazin) .Event in German. Site Specific event at the Humboldt Forum.
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“The Living Monument – Feminist Artistic Practice In and Across Social Fault Lines”
(Das lebendige Denkmal – künstlerisch-feministische Arbeit in und mit gesellschaftlichen Bruchlinien) Anna Krenz (Dziewuchy Berlin Collective) / Gisela Mackenroth (Friedrich Schiller University Jena). Panel 3: Contested Representations at "Umkämpftes Erinnern in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft" (Contested Remembering in the Post-Migrant Society" Seminar), 23-25.6.2025, Hochschule München, München.
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Lecture: “Lebendige Erinnerung: Polnische Kämpferinnen und Widerstandsaktivistinnen in Berlin” by Anna Krenz
80 Jahre Kriegsende, Freiflächen, “Un/sichtbar! 80 Jahre Kriegsende”
Event with: Margitta Steinbach, Sigrid Grajek, Raimund Wolfert (Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft), Moderator Shelly Kupferberg. 7.5.2025, Stadtmuseum, Berlin https://www.stadtmuseum.de/veranstaltungen/un-sichtbar-80-jahre-kriegsende

Research

2025-2026 Project: Polish Women in Resistance
in cooperation with Pilecki Institute, Berlin
2024 - Colonialism and Poland
Research Scholarschip / Pilecki Institute, Berlin
2022 - Polish Women in Resistance
Research scholarship / Fonds Darstellende Künste, Berlin
2022 - Irena Bobowska, Polish Resistance fighter
Research scholarship / Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa
2022 - Research Scholarship / The Foundation for Arts Initiatives, USA

Contact:
ANNA KRENZ
krenzarch(at)gmail.com
+491772725096

All rights reserved / copyrights Anna Krenz | 2025