This month, all over America, 10-year-old girls are packing bug spray, stationery, flashlights, and a stuffed animal smuggled past the “one comfort item” rule.

They will sleep in bunks, sing after dark and cry a little from homesickness. Eight weeks later, their parents will drive up the gravel road and take them home.

In the winter of 1944, a 10-year-old girl arrived at an all-girls camp too.

Camp Oberlangen. Stalag VI-C. About 1,700 girls and women behind barbed wire on a frozen German marsh near the Dutch border — all of them soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising, all of them prisoners of war.

Among them was my mother-in-law.

Edna arrived at camp with two medals and a lie.

Edna arrived at camp with two medals and a lie.

She carried the Cross of Valor, Poland’s decoration for exceptional bravery in combat, and the Medal for Wounds and Injuries, awarded after German shrapnel tore into her body. The lie keeping her alive was her name.

The camp roster identified her as Stefcia Skólkowska: a Polish Catholic orphan, a soldier of the Home Army, prisoner of war number 224040.

Her real name was Edna Szurek. She was a Jewish child born at 18 Miła Street, later enclosed within the Warsaw Ghetto. If anyone discovered who she was, the prisoner-of-war status General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski had fought to secure for his women soldiers might not protect her. She could simply disappear.

Camp is where children learn to be away from their parents.

Edna had no parents left to be away from.

Edna had no parents left to be away from.

At American summer camps, bunks smell of pine and sunscreen. At Oberlangen, 200 women slept in a room, in rotting barracks sinking into the marsh.

There was no heat during one of the coldest winters........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)