An unlikely correspondent's dispatch from Poland
The nine-paragraph story distributed by the Associated Press ran in multiple newspapers across the United States beginning Sept. 3, 1939. Datelined Warsaw, Sept. 2, it offered a brief and at that point unique glimpse inside Poland in the opening days of the German onslaught that sparked the Second World War.
The byline slapped on by the AP is jarring and bizarre when viewed through a modern lens: “MRS. W.J. MACHEDA, the former Helen Robinson”. Even worse, they got her married name wrong; it was actually Michejda. But the story’s kicker left no doubt the writer knew her way around a newsroom.
The piece recounts the journey she and her 9-year-old son Janek endured as they fled their home in Katowice for Warsaw, some 180 miles away.
Taking outside roads in order to avoid bombing of Katowice’s streets, I met hundreds of other refugees hurrying along in the open country’s comparative safety.
Especially along a road near Czestochowa which runs close to the German border all highways and paths were full of peasants attempting to escape. Some drove cows, some carried children and their household belongings. Some of them were bowed under the burden of heavy bundles slung over their backs.
Then German planes soared over the roadway and we were suddenly between antiaircraft fire from both sides. Soldiers halted me once to have me take a wounded man but when they saw my small son they waved me on and took the following car.
Germans staged another raid while I was passing through Radomsko. I saw several houses seriously damaged and was told 30 were killed and 60 were wounded there but I didn’t want to linger for a personal survey.
They arrived in Warsaw in time to be caught in another German air raid, and Michejda wrote that she hoped to leave the country and depart the continent via Riga, Latvia, when possible, “although it now looks impossible.”
She finished the short piece with a spectacular final sentence:
“My son wants to go to America immediately and bring back cowboys to fight Hitler.”
The one newspaper that got Michejda’s byline correct was the Palladium-Item of Richmond, Indiana. More than a decade earlier, Helen Robinson had worked as a reporter for her hometown paper and her parents still lived in the city.
Helen was driven from an early age. Her senior quote in her high school yearbook came from abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison: “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”
She was taking classes at Radcliffe College when she met Wladyslaw J. Michejda, who was attending Harvard at the time. They married in 1927 and moved to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, where Michejda worked as an engineer for a coal mining company.
The Polish government asked him to help develop mines back in his home country, so they moved to Europe. Their son Janek was born near Katowice on Dec. 31, 1929.
Nearly a decade later, as the situation in Poland became increasingly unstable, Helen wrote to her parents in Indiana that she and her son would leave the border region and head for the interior of the country if war broke out.
That’s exactly what they did, as her narrative described. But her former colleague back in Richmond believed her dispatch was more than just her old journalistic instincts kicking in. In an extended caption that ran under a photo of Helen and Janek on the front page of the Palladium-Item’s Sept. 3 editions, they included this note:
The accompanying Associated Press article by Mrs. Michejda, in the estimation of the editor, is her clever method of sending word to her parents here that she is safe because the telegraph is closed to most persons during the war. A clever American news woman would think of this way …
The editor probably was right, but Warsaw was hardly the end of the story for Michejda and her son.
After a few days in the capital, those two and their governess headed for the Russian border, which then was at Tarnopol (now Ternopil, Ukraine). They were denied entry there, so turned south for Romania, where they again were turned away because young Jan didn’t have the proper papers.
The two women eventually crossed into Romania on their own, leaving Jan with friends who managed to get him over the border a few hours later. In Bucharest, they secured passports and boarded a train to Rome, where they were told they could not sail for America on the Italian ocean liner Rex because they were “citizens of a warring country.”
The trio then headed for Naples, where they were able to board the same ship and make the crossing, arriving in New York on Oct. 15. From there, they would eventually drive west, making stops to visit family along the way, before pulling into Richmond on Nov. 6 — and promptly sitting down for an extensive interview with the Palladium-Item.
Michejda did a series of speaking engagements after settling in back home, regaling various civic groups in the region with tales of life in Poland. She decided to keep up her impromptu speaking tour and headed west to visit a cousin in Southern California, where she would eventually make her home.
The 1940 census listed her occupation as “lecturer” and her marriage status as divorced. In an interview with the Pasadena Post earlier in the year she had said she had heard nothing about her husband’s fate since a brief meeting with him as they fled to Warsaw.
Michejda moved to Redlands, California, in 1955 and would remain there for decades. A brief item appeared in the Redlands Daily Facts in 1964 noting the publication in English of Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden’s book Time and Modes of Being, which had been translated by Michejda.
Though Helen Robinson Michejda never returned to journalism, her report from Poland stands as an enduring snapshot of the moment and a remarkable period in her long life. She died in Minnesota in November 2005, a few months shy of her 101st birthday.