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Alfreda Markowska

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Alfreda Markowska (known as Noncia), born in 1926 in the Roma caravan near Stanisławow.

In 1939, the Noncia’s caravan fled from the Lviv area to the west, near Biała Podlaska. There in 1941, the Germans murdered her parents and siblings along with about 80 members of her extended Roma family. Noncia miraculously survived and began her journey seeking those who might had survived. While she was on the road, she survived and fled the ghetto in Lublin, Bełżca and Łódź. At one point she found her husband in Rozwadów.

She resisted the Nazi death sentence handed down to the Roma people by hard work on the railways and false documents. Noncia would snatch children away from mass transports headed to concentration camps. Thanks to the railway documents, she traveled to pacification sites in search of surviving children. She organized hideouts and fake documents for children, and looked for their further relatives or raised the Roma and Jewish orphans herself.

Noncia suffered extreme persecution as a child and had since done her best to ensure that no child she would encounter was ever persecuted again.