The fact that Janine Kozlowski at age 84 builds large wooden mangers for Nativity scenes qualifies as a story in itself as Christmas approaches, but there’s so much more to her life that it’s challenging to find a spot to jump in.
Go back to the beginning, and the Polish emigrant, who 20 years ago moved to central Ohio to be closer to her son’s family, survived the Nazi invasion of her native country during World War II and the post-war Communist takeover by the Soviet Union.
Then there’s her move to the United States, where she settled in the New York-Connecticut area and became a successful interior designer whose client list included rich and famous personalities.
And now in her golden years, she not only builds the Nativities she donates, but she’s also a prolific rosary maker. Actually, prolific might put it mildly.
To date, she has made more than 39,000 rosaries that she donates to churches in the diocese and to missions throughout the world. And if that’s not enough, she constructs wooden stands for churches to display the rosaries she provides free.
At the heart of everything lies a deep Catholic faith and a love for the “Holy Mother” Mary that has sustained her through unimaginable trauma as a child to where she’s at today – a widow and grandmother a long, long way from where she started her life.
“God’s given me many gifts,” Kozlowski said, “and I’m not lazy. I’m willing to work, and I never count the cost.”
Her dedication and work ethic can be traced to her youth in Poland.
In the beginning
Kozlowski was born in a small village about 50 miles from the Russian border. When she was a year old, World War II started, and the Germans occupied Poland.
With the Nazi soldiers in charge, living conditions were horrific. She remembers seeing signs on barns, houses and trees that read “for every German who dies, 100 Poles must die.”
“They were butchers,” she recalled, “because when one German died, they gathered people in a barn, poured gasoline on them and burned them not that far from me.”
She remembers a mother with twins being shot and the hundreds who died being buried in a mass grave.
“We heard them singing a song to Holy Mother when they were dying in that barn,” she said.
One girl avoided death after a German told her to hide in a basement while his fellow soldiers were drunk and celebrating.
“They stripped everything from us,” she said. “No hygiene and no food.”
Not every German soldier had evil intentions. One, she recalled, had pity on her mother because the soldier had left a wife and five children of his own behind at home. She also remembered another soldier accompanying her mother into the woods and shooting a pig.
“He helped my mother cut it into pieces, and he said, ‘At least you’re going to have food for your children,’” Kozlowski said.
Her mother also hid potatoes and other items in an underground bunker to feed her children.
As the war raged on through the first half of the 1940s, the Germans moved through Poland into Russia and then back across the Polish border to return home. Then the Russians occupied the country after the war ended in 1945.
“In Warsaw, you saw maybe half of the buildings standing after the bombings and people – pregnant women – standing everywhere,” she said.
“I was so traumatized when the Germans were leaving the country because the bombing was everywhere,” she said. “One man came to my mother and told her to ‘take your children somewhere because we have an order to burn your village to the ground.’
“So, my mother took her five children, and we were sleeping in a ditch, shivering, and everywhere we looked was fire. Two bombs exploded so close to us in that ditch that debris fell on us. There I was, 7 years old.
“After the war, I was so petrified every time I saw a plane that I hid in the woods. One time, I hid under a sack-like mattress for two days, and the whole village was looking for me.”
She and her siblings walked 3 kilometers (about 2 miles) to school each day, often soaking wet or freezing without protection from the rain or snow. And they were always hungry.
“It’s a miracle that we didn’t die from pneumonia or something,” she said. “So that’s why I was thinking many times that God, He knows about me personally, and I cling to Him.
“They think differently in the United States. They think more like God is there, and He’s good, but He doesn’t know us.”
The unsanitary conditions left her with an infestation of parasites and lice and suffering from malnutrition.
“The one source of food was bread and milk, and I could not have milk because the parasites would come into my throat and suck the milk,” she painfully recalled.
She lost her hair due to the lice, and she had trouble sleeping. Her mother had heard about a remedy mixing kerosene and sugar to kill the parasites. She gave it to Janine, and the parasites died, but the stench of kerosene stayed within her for years. She was finally able to digest milk for the first time at age 20.
The lack of nourishment had impacted her digestion and affected her teeth for chewing food.
“It’s just horror, and that was my childhood,” she said. “I could have ended up a monster because of a bad childhood, but God loves me, and I try to be generous today. I always put myself in the backseat and not in the front seat.”
Despite the extreme hardships the Polish people faced, they stubbornly resisted Nazi and Communist attempts during and after the war to silence the Catholic Church. Janine’s family continued to attend Mass.
“We even had processions on Corpus Christi Sunday after the war in the city, and there were cops everywhere,” she said. “But they would not shoot the mothers. The Russians just stood there with their machine guns, and nobody would stop the priests with the Blessed Sacrament while the bells were ringing.”
Her family life obviously was turned upside down.
The Germans took her father away when she was very young, but he was spared death in a concentration camp. He was put to work in a factory near Dachau after the Nazis recognized his talents as a master builder and carpenter could be useful.
One day, a guard told her father to run away and return to his family while the other guards were sleeping. Her father would not go until a friend and a neighbor were allowed to escape with him.
“But they could not come home because they would be publicly executed if they were found,” she explained. “So, they stayed in the woods in a big hole that the Jewish people dug to hide when they were taking Jewish people to the concentration camp.”
The men secretly told a farmer passing by to let their wives know where they were hiding. Each week for months, the wives would sneak into the woods to bring them food.
During the Nazi occupation, Kozlowski’s mother worked at night and miraculously managed to avoid stepping on one of the landmines the Germans planted while going back and forth in the dark between her job and home.
“A lot of people stepped on those mines and were torn to pieces,” Kozlowski said. “My first cousin died this way. She was 16 years old. Those were terrible times.”
After the war, her father used his skills as a craftsman to provide for his family. He ended up living to age 83.
Existing under the rule of the Soviet Communists was no picnic. The Polish people were subjected to constant surveillance. One bad word about the Communists and entire families would vanish.
“No one would ever hear about you again,” Kozlowski related. “You would go to a place of torture. They would put your hand in a door and slam it. They would put nails under your fingernails.
“They were mean. They were barbarians no better than Hitler. I hated the Communists when they came. They never said one truthful thing.”
She despised the Communist regime so much that she vowed that she would one day go to America to live.
“I said to myself, ‘I’m never going to live in this country.’”
Kozlowski was an intelligent girl who did well in school and landed a job as a young adult. The Catholic faith that continues to guide her today was gleaned mostly from her mother, a devout woman who died of cancer at age 65.
Her mother had two sisters who were nuns and influenced Kozlowski greatly.
Kozlowski was undergoing throat cancer treatment at the time of her mother’s death and could not attend the funeral. In Kozlowski’s later years, she also survived several serious surgeries and a bout with salmonella that caused kidney failure so severe that a doctor told her son it would be a miracle if she survived.
“I trust God – totally,” she said. “He’s awesome.”
Coming to America
Kozlowski’s dream to come to the United States was realized after she met her future husband, who was living in America and had come home to Poland to visit, through a family connection. Four months later, they were married.
Then she waited nine months and 10 days in Poland before her visa came through, allowing her to go to the United States.
“The Communists did everything in their power to stop me,” she said. “But they could not stop me because we went to a judge to allow an American citizen to marry a Polish girl.”
Her husband was a survivor himself of a Russian prison in Siberia during World War II when he was taken into custody after making the mistake of riding his bicycle across the border between Poland and Russia.
He nearly froze and starved to death there, but a Ukrainian soldier helped him. He was let go from prison and joined a Polish army unit known as Anders’ Army – commanded by Gen. Wladyslaw Anders – that trained in the Middle East, fought the Germans in Italy and was involved in the capture of Monte Cassino in 1944.
After the war, he came to the United States at the invitation of a friend of his mother who lived in Stamford, Connecticut.
When Kozlowski arrived in Connecticut after their marriage, she began to use the skills that she had learned at a Polish trade school.
Her sewing ability led to a job designing sample wedding gowns and debutante dresses in New York City for runway shows that attracted buyers from high-end stores such as Bloomingdale’s.
Then she went into business for herself as an interior designer. She was unique in that she not only conceived the designs but also did the construction.
“I designed a lot of things when I had my business – pillows, headboards, cornices for windows,” she said. “My work was everywhere.
“I went to the lumber yard to get the wood, put the thick foam on and then covered with fabric or leather and then tucked it in with buttons. They loved it.
“I was very conscientious in my work. I never let anything go out of my place unless, in my mind, it was perfect.”
At home, she was just as meticulous about raising her two children and sharing with them her love for the Catholic faith.
Her husband was supportive and came to church on Sunday with the family, but he did not regularly receive the sacrament of penance until one Holy Thursday when their son was preparing to receive his First Holy Communion.
“My husband asked me what I wanted for Easter,” she said, “and I said, ‘The best gift you can give me is to go to confession.’
“He said, ‘What am I going to say? I don’t kill, I don’t steal. I didn’t cheat on you. I didn’t do anything wrong. Why am I going to say?’
“I said, ‘You don’t know what to say because you’re comparing yourself to Al Capone. Compare yourself with Mother Teresa, and maybe you will find something. You’re not perfect every single day.’”
While she was standing in line waiting to go to confession herself, her husband had left the pew, unbeknown to her, to get in line for confession. And every year after that he received the sacrament of reconciliation at Eastertime.
In November 1993, her husband died suddenly, leaving her alone in a large home that led to panic and anxiety attacks over the next few years.
In 2003, she moved to Ohio to be near her son and his family.
Rosary making
About nine years ago, a friend suggested Kozlowski make rosaries. She was introduced to the late Ed Schmeltzer, a Newark Blessed Sacrament Church parishioner who came to Granville St. Edward Church, where Kozlowski was then a member, to explain how to make rosaries.
After a half-hour, she grasped the technique and was off to the races making beautiful rosaries.
As with everything else she has done in life, the rosaries must be completed perfectly with ideal knots and spacing. She does not allow one rosary to leave her home if it’s not her best work.
“Would you accept it?” she said of shoddily made rosaries. “It would be wrong for Holy Mother. Don’t you think your rosaries should be perfect?”
A rosary-making group formed at St. Edward with nine women. Some of them said to Kozlowski that they couldn’t make beautiful rosaries, but she encouraged them, saying, “If you really want to make prefect rosaries, God will help you.”
To those who made rosaries but didn’t particularly care how well they turned out, she said, “Why do you think a person doesn’t deserve a good rosary? With my rosaries, I don’t think about whether I’m making one for a woman in Africa or Asia; I’m making this rosary for Holy Mother and her Son.
“The rosary is Jesus’ life. So, we have to make good rosaries. How can you be good at anything if you don’t care?”
To date, she has finished 39,000-plus rosaries that she has sent to countries throughout the world or donated to at least 15 parishes in the Diocese of Columbus. The cord-and-bead rosaries are meticulously crafted to honor the “Holy Mother” and spread devotion to Our Lady.
She spends 3 ½-4 hours each day in her meticulously-kept condominium making 20 rosaries, which adds up to 480 a month and 5,000 a year. The supplies cost her $1,000 a year.
In her “spare” time, she also builds large wooden mangers from scratch for Nativity scenes. She has constructed 10 of them that vary in size and design and has donated or given each as a gift.
Kozlowski, who now attends Newark St. Francis de Sales Church, has osteoporosis and issues with her hands, hip and lower back. When she makes rosaries, the pain leaves her and then returns when she stops.
“You know what teaches me patience? The rosary,” she said. “And I have patience because I pray to God to give me patience, good health. I pray that Jesus may help me to make rosaries with love, and I say to his mother: ‘This is for you and for your Son.’”
Her goal is to make 40,000 rosaries.
“And, you know what? I told the Lord that ‘You can take me when I make 40,000 rosaries,’” she said, “because I want to make 1,000 rosaries for each day that Jesus suffered in the desert.”
Considering all that she has endured, no one doubts that she’ll achieve her goal and serve as an inspiration to anyone who might be struggling or aging.