Ina Benita was born in 1912 in Kiev. In the 1920s she came to Warsaw with her parents. She graduated from the Sacré-Cœur school in Paris and made her theater debut in 1931. She appeared on screen a year later in Ryszard Biski’s film “Puszcza”.
Because of love, she was sent to Pawiak. She fell in love with a German oppositionist
She was considered great, graceful and incredibly talented. She played with heart and applied herself to every role, although most often she played seductive women and femme fatales. Ina Benita was in relationships with several men, but her relationship with a married lieutenant responsible for documenting activities, Otto Haver, led to her being sent to Pawiak. The Polish woman’s relationship with the occupier was not well received, and the actress faced social ostracism. The situation was made worse by the fact that Haver was married. When she was released, she became involved with Hans Georg Pasch, a German oppositionist to Nazi policy. They both worked underground and helped Poles and Jews. In 1944, they were imprisoned in Pawiak, where Ina gave birth to her son, Tadeusz Michał.
The family didn’t know that she was once an actress. “We thought she was in a concentration camp.”
The day before the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, she was seen descending into underground sewers with a child. Later, Ina Benita was never heard from again, so it was believed that she died during the uprising. Her son was found and was taken care of by Zofia Grzesik, a nurse from the Gray Ranks. However, it turned out that the actress had fled abroad with her lover. After the war, she came back for her son. Hanse Georg Pasch died and she went to France and later lived in the USA with her next husband, a US Air Force soldier. In the United States, she worked as a cleaner and maid. It turned out that all this time Ina had not told her family that she was a famous Polish actress, and this was true many years later. — Before we learned the truth about her life, we thought she was in a concentration camp, so I asked her how she got out. (…) I wondered why she didn’t have a camp number tattooed on her. She recalled that she ended up in the camp not because she was Jewish, but because her husband was an underground fighter – Millie Scudder, the daughter-in-law of an actress. Ina Benita died in 1984.
Source: Gazeta
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