Olga Yosefina URBANOWICZ

1 JUL 1915 - 20 FEB 1972

• BIRTH: 1 JUL 1915, Pinsk, Belarus
• BURIAL: 1972, St Joseph Catholic Cemetery, South Bend IN
• DEATH: 20 FEB 1972, St Joseph County, IN

• MARRIAGE: MAR 1941, Belarus

1.  Victor DOWLUT
2.  George Joseph DOWLUT

INDEX

[N11704] Olga Yosefina Urbanowicz
Birth: Jul. 1, 1915
Pinsk, Belarus
Death: Feb. 20, 1972
St. Joseph County, Indiana, USA

PHOTOS: http://findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=33314683

Olga was born in Pinsk when it was a city in Poland. She was the youngest of nine children born to Joseph ("Osip" or "Iosif") Matveev URBANOWICZ and his wife, Julia (Yulianiya) MIRONOWICZ. Olga's father died before her 18th birthday. Olga knew only three siblings; her other siblings died before her birth. The siblings she knew were Nadia, Stanislaw, and Maria. When Olga was 24, Poland was under attack. The Russians invaded from the east and took over her hometown of Pinsk, and the Germans invaded Poland from the west. In March 1941, when she was 25, she married a man who had been part of the Polish Army that was at the western front of Poland when the Germans invaded on September 1, 1939. She risked punishment by the Soviet Communists by insisting on a marriage ceremony before a Catholic priest. Just three months after she married, her hometown came under the control of the German Nazi Army. When she was 26, she birthed her first child, Victor.
When she was 28, she, her husband, and their son were taken prisoner by the Nazis and ordered to get inside a cattle car on a train. After that day, she never saw or heard of her mother or her siblings She, her husband, and their baby were transported to Dachau, Germany, packed onto a cattle car so tightly that there was no room to sit. They were held in Dachau briefly before being transported to Augsburg, Germany, where Olga and her husband were held as forced labor, and where their young son Victor was killed by injection by a Nazi doctor. She was held in the forced labor camp until the camp was freed in June 1945. She was 30. After the camp was freed by the U.S. Second Army, it became a refuge camp. Because the part of Poland that had been Olga's home was given to the Russians as a "reward" at the Yalta Conference, Olga and her husband had no home to return to. If they had returned, the Soviets would have declared them traitors for having "allowed" themselves to be captured, and Olga and her husband would have been executed. She remained at the refuge camp until late 1949; she was 34. By then, she had borne two more children. With the help of Catholic Charities and a Catholic man who had some land that needed to be farmed, Olga and her family arrived at Ellis Island as Displaced Persons. She could not speak a word of English, and she had only an 8th grade education. A fourth child was born in America, when Olga was almost 35.
She lived out her life in Polish communities where almost everyone spoke Polish, where she could go to Church and the local grocer and always find people who spoke Polish. The language spoken in her home was Polish. And, at home, if she was not speaking Polish, she was speaking Russian.
.....

Ojcze nasz, którys jest w Niebie,
swiec sie Imie Twoje,
przyjdz Królestwo Twoje,
badz wola Twoja,
jako w Niebie, tak i na ziemi.
Chleba naszego powszedniego daj nam dzisiaj I odpusc nam nasze winy,
jako i my odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom,
i nie wódz nas na pokuszenie,
ale nas zbaw ode zlego.

Parents:
Joseph Matveev Urbanowicz (1875 - 1933)
Julia Veronica Mironowicz Urbanowicz (1875 - 1958)

Spouse:
Dyonizy Ivanovich Dowlut (1914 - 1989)*

Children:
George Joseph Dowlut (1947 - 2014)*

Sibling:
Maria Urbanowicz Maksymczuk (1914 - 1999)*
Olga Yosefina Urbanowicz Dowlut (1915 - 1972)

Burial: Saint Joseph Cemetery, South Bend, St. Joseph County, Indiana