Opinion: Renata Bogdanska-Anders

Renata Bogdanska was extraordinary in every sense – beautiful, talented, born into a distinguished Western Ukrainian family, and destined to become a Polish national icon. Her life reads like a novel: woman, singer, actress, diva, public figure. In one person, she embodied all the chaos and heartbreak of the twentieth century. And yet her story has been hidden away, distorted, forgotten. It’s time to tell the truth about who she really was.

Renata had as many names as she had great loves. Three of each, in fact. She was born as Irena Yarosevych in Czechia’s Eastern Silesia, then under Austrian rule. According to her Ukrainian family and church records and photos, she was born in 1917, and not in 1920 as subsequent official accounts claimed.

Her father was a Ukrainian Greek-Catholic priest from Austrian-ruled Western Ukraine, and a recently freed Austrian political prisoner. Her mother Olena’s brother was Ostap Nyzhankivsky, the celebrated Ukrainian composer. He was shot by the Poles in 1919 during a Polish-Ukrainian war for control over Western Ukraine that ended in a Polish victory. 

The family were Ukrainian patriots who resented Polish domination. They enrolled Irena and her brother Anatol in Plast, the Ukrainian patriotic scouts’ movement. 

She and her family knew the men who would become legends and demons, depending on who told the story – Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, figures whose names still ignite debate across Eastern Europe.

Preserving the Ukrainian identity meant resistance. Culture was politics, including in the realm of music and song.

Formative years and wartime

While studying to become an opera singer or classical pianist in Lviv (officially Lwów at the time), she spent her free time singing for the Yabtso orchestra, the most popular Ukrainian jazz band of its day. In around 1937, she became the girlfriend and muse of Bohdan Veselovsky, nicknamed Bondy, a leading Ukrainian composer of tango and light entertainment music. Together, they created something new – modern Ukrainian light music that spoke to a generation caught between tradition and modernity, between Polish domination and Ukrainian aspiration.

When political circumstances tore them apart in 1939, their love didn’t die. Bondy left in January to support the Ukrainian cause abroad and eventually ended up in Canada.

In September of that year, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany carved up Poland between them. The Red Army occupied Western Ukraine. Irena found herself in a dangerous position.

She began a relationship with Gwidon Borucki, a Polish-Jewish singer, and through him, she got her big break. She joined the Lviv Tea Jazz band – “Tea” stood for “Theatrical – a vaudeville orchestra and show created by the Soviets under the legendary Henryk Wars, a Polish-Jewish composer and film score writer from the interwar years. It was then that Irena Yarosevych became Renata Bogdanska—the stage name she chose in honor of Bohdan-Bondy, carrying a piece of her Ukrainian past into her Polish future.

After the Nazis invaded Poland, thousands of the country’s leading talents fled east to Soviet-held Lviv, seeking refuge. Jews especially. The Lviv Tea Jazz became an all-star ensemble. Besides Wars, there was Eugeniusz Bodo, Poland’s most popular interwar film star, and Michał Waszyński, the film director. 

The Soviet occupiers wanted to use the band for propaganda, to showcase the virtues of communist rule. This was even as they were secretly executing Polish officers at Katyn and deporting tens of thousands of Poles and Ukrainians. 

But the cosmopolitan outfit was clever. They defied Soviet control through ironic humor and subtle subversion.

Between 1940 and 1941, the Lviv Tea-Jazz toured the Soviet Union three times. They even recorded in Moscow. During the first tour, Irena-Renata married Borucki in Kyiv.

Fate was cruel to the Lviv Tea Jazz band. History was brutal to the region. Bodo vanished in April 1941. Only relatively recently did researchers discover that the Soviet secret police had arrested him as a “Swiss” spy. He died in the Gulag in 1943. 

When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, the orchestra was on tour in Siberia, cut off from everything. Somehow, eventually, they managed to join the new Polish army that Iosif Stalin formed in 1942 from Polish exiles and prisoners. Churchill and Roosevelt had insisted on it. 

The army was led by General Władysław Anders, a defiant man who’d been released from a Moscow prison. This ragged but proud force – the Anders Corps – made an epic journey through Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine before being deployed to Italy. They joined Allied forces at the siege of Monte Cassino, a strategic monastery in central Italy.

The Anders Corps reflected the ethnic diversity of interwar Poland. It included many Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews. Renata, Borucki, Wars – even the future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin – were all part of it.

The Polish forces found their moment of glory at Monte Cassino. After months of Allied siege, they were tasked with capturing the German-fortified monastery and succeeded. A patriotic Polish song, “Red Poppies at Monte Cassino,” became a massive hit. Borucki performed it first. Renata helped make it famous. 

General Anders fell in love with her. She was stunning and much younger, his comrade-in-arms. Eventually, they both divorced their spouses to be together. Understandably, she kept up the pretense that she was Polish.

Here’s something remarkable: at a time when reports of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in western Ukraine were deeply distressing, General Anders was aware of Renata’s Ukrainian background. He accepted it.

First lady of the Polish diaspora

After the war, the Soviet Union imposed communist rule on Poland. The Anders Corps couldn’t go home and their future hung in the balance. Renata – soon to be known as Irena Anders – starred in two Italian films in 1946. One featured Italian cinema legends Vittorio De Sica and Anna Magnani.

Great Britain invited the Anders Corps to settle there. Mrs. Anders and her husband made London their home. She became a star of Polish broadcasts on Radio Free Europe and the BBC, beaming programs into communist-ruled Poland. 

She shone as the first lady of the Polish diaspora, all while pretending to be Polish. Yet in 1950, General Anders secretly visited her Ukrainian brother and sister in New York. Renata also befriended Volodymyr Luciw, a Ukrainian singer based in London. Through him, she reconnected with Veselovsky in Canada. In 1970, a year before he died, she recorded some songs in Ukrainian to his music in London.

Her later years were lonely. General Anders died in 1970 and her daughter Anna Maria married and moved to the US. Still, Renata kept promoting her husband’s legacy, especially after Poland finally threw off communist rule. 

In 2007, Polish president Lech Kaczyński awarded her Poland’s highest civilian honor – the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole, received her warmly. When Renata died in 2010, the Poles gave her a funeral with military honors. She was buried next to General Anders at Monte Cassino.

But in private, Renata never disavowed her Ukrainian soul. Every Ukrainian Christmas Eve – Jan. 6 – she would call Luciw in London and sing Ukrainian carols to him over the phone. 

In her final years, after Ukraine became independent, she even secretly visited Lviv several times. What she felt, walking those streets in her advanced years, she kept largely to herself.

This double life was not deception; it was survival of a different kind. Renata understood what many of her contemporaries could not: that the categories we use to organize the world – Polish, Ukrainian, this nation or that – are often too rigid to contain the messy reality of human lives. She had loved a Ukrainian composer and a Polish general. She had sung in Polish and prayed in Ukrainian. She had been formed by the nationalist fervor of interwar Ukraine and had become a pillar of the Polish community in Britain. These weren’t contradictions to be resolved. They were truths she held in tension.

What we can learn from Renata’s legacy

Today, Poland and Ukraine stand together against Russian aggression. Polish cities welcome millions of Ukrainian refugees. Old enmities give way to new solidarities. And Renata’s story matters now. 

The border between Poland and Ukraine has always been more permeable than the maps suggest. Families, friendships, and love affairs have crossed it. 

Irena’s older contemporary, Western Ukraine’s great religious and moral leader, Andrey Shpetytsky, was perhaps the most shining example of a Ukrainian patriot with Polish origins who sought understanding and cooperation among the Ukrainians, Poles and Jews inhabiting his troubled region.

When we honor her memory, we’re also honoring the ties binding Poland and Ukraine, stronger than the forces that have tried to drive them apart. Renata, in her quiet way, spent her whole life making that future possible.

The incredible story of this inspiring woman – the “Muse of the Bloodlands,” as I’ve named her – deserves epic novels and films. It deserves to be known.

Finally, it should be mentioned that her daughter, Anna Maria Anders Costa has continued to uphold the legacy of her parents as a Polish Senator and more recently Ambassador in Rome.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.

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