Holocaust survivor brings late wife’s ashes to final resting spot in Bodega Bay

Mitka Kalinski consoled his great-grandson, Aiden, as they sat outside and felt the early fall breeze at Doran Campground on Bodega Bay.

The wind carried the ashes of Kalinski’s late wife, Adrienne, along the coastline.

“Grandma is with us. She’s got her arms around us,” Kalinski told Aiden, 6, as he hugged him closer.

The two were joined this day, Sept. 27, by 16 members of their family to bring Adrienne to her final resting spot. Bodega Bay was a place she and her husband had considered their home away from home.

Adrienne died May 21, 2022, in Sparks, Nevada, where the couple lived since 1959 and had raised four children. But the oceanside Sonoma County town was an important part of their lives.

In 1963, the pair saw Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and soon after visited Bodega Bay, where parts of the horror classic were filmed. They fell in love with its scenic vistas — and would return every year.

Kalinski, now nearing age 90, wept at the campground as a Bluetooth speaker played Johnny and June Carter Cash’s song, “Far Side Banks of Jordan,” per Adrienne’s final request. In the heartfelt song, the duo sing to one another as if they’re nearing the end of their lives.

Kalinski, an eastern European immigrant and Holocaust survivor, met his beloved Adrienne more than 70 years earlier.

In 1953, the two worked for a construction company. She was in the payroll office and he was a bricklayer. He would impress her by driving a forklift as fast as he could. They married that same year.

Adrienne was Kalinski’s lodestar, the gentle guiding force by his side.

It wasn’t until 28 years into their marriage when Kalinski told his wife about his experience in World War II. About the Jewish mother he never knew. About the bullets and the bodies, the medical experiments on pregnant women he witnessed at a German labor camp. About the Stockholm Syndrome-like relationship he developed with “Uncle” Gustav Dörr, a Nazi officer and Kalinski’s captor, who would savagely beat him.

Kalinski was placed in a boarding school near Kyiv in 1939 when the war began in Poland and his father served in the Polish army. In 1941, when the Germans invaded Ukraine and Russia, he survived a bombing at the school.

He ran through the forests and fields of Ukraine to escape the Wehrmacht as it pushed east. He survived a machine gun massacre by lying under bodies in a pit, but was captured and forced onto a train headed into the heart of the German Reich.

He was sent to Pfaffenwald, a labor camp in west-central Germany, until December 1942, when Dörr pulled him out and put him to work.

Kalinski toiled as a slave laborer at Dörr’s family farm in Rotenburg an der Fulda, in central Germany, where he was forced to sleep in the animal stables.

The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration discovered him and extracted him from the farm in 1949, nearly four years after the end of World War II.

Confronting past torment

Adrienne implored him to reconnect with his Jewish roots, and to confront his German tormentors. So, after he became an American citizen, he and Adrienne traveled to Germany in 1984 to visit the Dörr family.

There they learned Gustav Dörr had only recently died.

But it was during that visit Kalinski also worked with a researcher to document and confront the town’s Nazi past.

Robert Lucchesi, once an aspiring screenwriter, met Kalinski in 1994 in Bodega Bay. He recognized the importance of telling Kalinski’s story to a wide audience. Lucchesi gathered a team of writers — including Steven Brallier, Joel Lohr and Lynn Beck — and in 2021 published “Mitka’s Secret: A True Story of Child Slavery and Surviving the Holocaust.”

The book was dedicated to the children of the Holocaust, “whose stories will never be told.”

Adrienne’s diligent work as the family historian, including photo albums she created each year, helped the authors piece together the complex story.

Kalinski became a minor celebrity around Nevada. Each spring he visited local high schools to speak about the war and the importance of remembering.

Adrienne died just a few weeks shy of her 93rd birthday. Crestfallen, Kalinski sat alone in their modest Sparks home and hugged her urn, etched with seagulls and the beach shoreline of Bodega Bay.

He felt as alone as he had during that first cold winter sleeping in the Rotenburg stables, as alone as when he arrived in New York City without knowing a soul. But he was surrounded by photographs and signs of their life together.

His daughter, Donna, his caretaker and next-door neighbor, told him once the blood clots in his legs — from sitting too long with Adrienne at the hospital — healed they could return to Bodega Bay, their happy place.

But how could he make that familiar drive with the camper to the Pacific Ocean without her?

Each time Mitka shared his story, at schools, at buffets, in TV interviews, or through the pages of “Mitka’s Secret,” audiences listened and wept, and found ways to honor him.

In mid-September, Mitka was invited to join an Honor Flight of veterans to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Several of the veterans on the trip had served in Patton’s Third Army, which liberated western Germany, including Rotenburg an der Fulda.

To each New Orleanian who would listen, Kalinski told his story and promoted his book. He also told strangers how much he missed Adrienne.

“My life was full of love,” Mitka said days after returning from Bodega Bay. “I always sang and whistled to her. She liked it. I don’t know how to behave myself now that she’s gone.

“I love her so much.”