Clodagh Finn: The ‘modern Cinderella’ who made her mark behind Iron Curtain
Maura Wallace made a lasting impression on the medical community in Bialystok in Poland where she taught doctors English and translated their medical papers.
It seemed like a dream come true, just as the newspapers reported. In January 1949, Maura Wallace, a 17-year-old waitress from Sixmilebridge in Co Clare, left the Irish winter behind to take up a job as nanny to a “sun-seeking, globetrotting millionaire family” on their round-the-world tour.
First stop, New York, where her new employers promised her a “complete wardrobe of new American clothes and finery”. Then it was on to Miami, Florida, for the spring.
“Her childhood dream and youthful wishes have come true in this modern Cinderella story,” the press reports said, with joyful relish.
And Maura Wallace really had such a dream. “When I was a child I once dreamt that I was very wealthy and in a distant land dressed in fine clothes, and as I daily attended the [airline] crew members at the hotel [Old Ground Hotel in Ennis], I wished I could one day go to the United States. But it was just a wish and I never believed it would come true.”
When she boarded the four-engined Constellation aircraft at Shannon airport — every detail was noted — the air hostess said: “Now, Maura, it is my turn to attend to you.”
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It was an exciting time in the Shannon region, which was fast becoming a hub for transatlantic flights. Just two years before, Brendan O’Regan had opened the world’s first duty-free shop there, and Maura was working with his sister Josette in Ennis.
A pilot staying at the hotel had been asked by an American millionaire industrialist, named as Mr Anzians, to recruit a well-educated young Irish girl to work as nanny to his two children. Josette recommended Maura.
“I am simply overjoyed with the whole idea,” Maura said, as she boarded the plane.
Then the trail ends. In the newspapers at least.
Whatever happened to this young woman who stepped into a “modern Cinderella story” all those decades ago?
Her sister Christina Byrne, aged 85, takes up the story at her kitchen table in Co Clare. It’s been nearly two years since Ger Reddan, a nephew, put us in touch and now, arrangements finally made, there’s a huge welcome, a shepherd’s pie, a rhubarb tart (with cream) and pots of tea to fuel the compelling account of what happened next.
It feels like a terrible anti-climax, though, to hear that Maura didn’t really like her new job. She suffered awful loneliness in those first months away from home, and left the post shortly afterwards to move in with relatives.
She stayed on in America though and got work in a hospital. There she met Polish doctor Tomasz Tolwinski, “fell madly in love”, to quote her sister, and married him. The newlyweds moved to Poland in the 1950s which was then behind the so-called Iron Curtain, a fitting metaphor for the sharp division between the Soviet-controlled Communist East and the democratic West.
The contrast between Maura Wallace’s fairytale trip to the land of plenty and her arrival in a country where economic hardship and repression were daily facts of life could not have been starker.
Yet, Maura Tolwinska, or Mora as her friends knew her, was happy there and made a lasting impression on the medical community in Bialystok in northeast Poland where she taught doctors English and translated their medical papers.
One of those doctors, Wiktor Laszewicz, Professor of Gastroenterology, recalled her boundless patience and her ability to translate specialised medical texts. The doctors lined up to be taught English by her, he said.
“When she was teaching us English, everybody felt very comfortable with her, and during her lecture we talked freely about everything, but only in English. It was the only language she let us speak. Very often students talked about something very specific, or [personal] problems. She was like a ‘confessional’."
She had a great sense of humour too, he said, and laughed very hard when somebody told her an anecdote.
Maura Wallace kept in touch with home too, as much as travel restrictions and censored letters allowed. Christina Byrne was just nine when her eldest sister left and is still moved to tears when she remembers meeting her again after several years as she was passing through an airport in the UK, in the 1960s, en route to Poland.
There were trips home and trips to Poland. She remembers sending suitcases of clothes to Poland after Penneys first opened in the late 1960s and hearing news of Maura’s three children, Gaby, Kasia and Stefan.
Christina had ten children of her own. “I remember being pregnant for 12 Christmases in a row, but I lost two,” she says, offering an insight into her own extraordinary life. After her husband died, aged 61, and her children were all grown up, she woke up one morning and decided she wanted to go to California. She did just that and worked as a cook/chef in Beverly Hills for a number of years, bumping into the likes of Lionel Richie, Jackie Jackson, and Anthony Hopkins.
When you pull a thread, a story reveals very many strands. The kettle is on again and the photograph album is out; there’s a photo of Maura wearing a jacket that Christina gave her. “She said she liked it and I just gave it to her.” That same connection between sisters is evident again when Christina describes going to Poland to look after her sister when she was terminally ill in 2004. Another sister sent flour and raisins from England because all Maura would eat were scones.
She had been a heavy smoker all her life and continued to smoke, but in secret. When Christina saw smoke coming out of the bathroom, she asked Maura why she bothered hiding.
“I’m Irish,” she replied, “the guilt, you always get the guilt!”
During those final days, Maura asked Christina to root out a tape of the Cork comedian Niall Tóibín because she had never laughed so much when she heard it. When Christina pressed play, the tape turned out to be the sisters’ mother, also named Christina, talking.
It was as if she was joining them too; another woman with a story to tell. The mother of 11 was a great singer, wrote several stories and, shortly before her death, had the distinction of being named Millennium Granny on RTÉ’s .
“She told Derek Davis that she wanted to bring him a pair of braces because she said his trousers always seemed to be falling down. She thought she was going to be thrown out but then he opened his jacket and pulled on a pair of braces and laughed.”
During those last weeks, Christina asked her sister how she had reached such acceptance of death; “She looked at me, winked and said — she had a little bit of the American accent mixed in — it’s because you are here with me, kid.”
She died on August 9, 2004. “We do not say goodbye to you Maura,” Prof Laszewicz wrote later, “you will always be in our memories.” Sometime after her death, Christina discovered that Maura had written a book. She is going to try to find it. Then perhaps, she might think about writing her own.
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