Once armed with Maria’s real last name, Gelenievicz, I dove headlong into two archives rich in Polish Jewish genealogical information, Crarg.org and Jewishgen.org. These sites allow you to search phonetically, which proved useful because Maria’s family’s records spelled their surname Jeleniewicz.
Here I discovered Maria’s actual birthdate. As expected, the day matched up: June 24. But her birth year was 1895 rather than 1905 as she later maintained. It’s hard to say when exactly she shaved ten years off her age, but I suspect it was in the mid-1920s, when she was struggling to break into German theater and cinema. (Film has always worshipped youth!)
I also learned here that Maria was born in Kolno, but that the family moved to Częstochowa not long after, which perhaps explains why the latter is listed on her American Foreign Service death document as her birthplace. Having grown up mostly there and left Kolno so young, Maria herself may have thought this was where she was born.
Why did the family move from the village of Kolno to the small city of Częstochowa? One can only guess. The most likely explanation seems to me that when Maria arrived the family needed to move somewhere her father could find better paying and more reliable work—factory work.
I also discovered the existence of her brother, Aleksander, born December 22, 1896, some eighteen months after Maria:
Some reports of Maria Lani from 1928-29 mention a brother (sometimes assumed to be Max’s brother) collaborating in her adventures; this is most likely the same man.
I suspect Maria and Aleksander parted ways sometime in the 1930s. As I’ll discuss later, when Maria and Max fled Hitler, their ship’s documents show they traveled with a cousin but not Alexander. I have found evidence of two Alexander Jeleniewiczes, living in Italy and the U.S. in later years, but I can’t confirm either was Maria’s brother.
My final discovery in these databases was Maria’s parents, her father Abram Dawid and mother Chawa (sometimes spelled Ewa) née Botkowska, likely 26 and 23 years old respectively at the time of Maria’s birth. (I reconstructed Maria’s family tree back even farther, but found nothing there of great interest.)
As quickly as Maria’s father materialized before my eyes, a bit farther down the page his life was snuffed out again. Records show that Abram died in 1910, shortly before Maria turned fifteen.
Abram’s cause of death is not listed, but for dramatic purposes we speculated that if he died this young it was most likely from an all-too common factory accident. Anti-Jewish violence seems another strong possibility.
After Abram’s death, Chawa is recorded as a “worker” and a “widow” from Bielsko, now living at 7 Cerkiewna (“Church Street”), in a middle-class neighborhood of Częstochowa, with Maria and Alexander.
I was unable to find Cerkiewna on modern maps of Częstochowa, but on the Częstochowa map below, from 1915, one finds a street perhaps by that name, indicated by the red arrow I added (though, to be fair, the map is handwritten and not easy for me to decipher):
Aptly, there has been a church on this street since 1582, currently named the Roman Catholic Parish of St. James the Apostle.
If anyone who knows the architectural history of Częstochowa wants to help me find the precise location of Maria’s house, I’d be forever grateful! The building itself is likely no longer there, but perhaps a historical photo could be dug up if we could nail down its location.