Jessica Cathrine Glenn

Jessica Glenn, age 83, of Wildomar, California passed away on July 29th following complications from a recent stroke. Jessica (original name Fuks) was born in 1936 in a small village in Eastern Poland near the present-day city of Tarnopol, which is now a part of the Ukraine. Little did she know in 1936 what lay ahead for her and the life challenges she would face. Jessica was a survivor of ethic cleansing carried out by the Soviet Union at the outset of World War II which was targeted against the military, intellectuals and ethnic Poles. At the age of three, she and her family members including her Father Walter, her Mother Katherine, and two brothers (Bruno and Thaddeus) were loaded into boxcars and exiled to Siberia where they were forced to work in a slave labor camp. Jessica and her brother Bruno were the only two members of her family to survive this ordeal. Upon their release in 1941, they, along with 11,000 other orphans, began an arduous journey to freedom via train from Siberia, across the Caspian Sea to Iran, by boat to Bombay, India and eventually across the Pacific to California. However, that was not the end of their journey and they were settled in a Polish orphanage in Santa Rosa, Mexico in October of 1943. After several years, she and her brother were taken in by an order of Catholic nuns from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and crossed into the United States at Laredo, Texas in 1946. She was later placed into foster care with responsibilities for looking after an elderly invalid and not permitted to attend school on a regular basis. Fortunately, due to a set of unforeseen and fortuitous circumstances she was taken in by a loving family (Sam and Betty Dziuban) residents of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town north of Pittsburgh. Sam and Betty were very good to Jessica and treated her as one of their own. Despite the passage of time, Jessica always described her time living with them as “some of the best years of her life”. She mastered the English language, completed high school, became an accomplished cook and seamstress and loved gardening. Jessica worked for General Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh. She later met and married Edward Marcinek, a barber from Ford City, Pa and eventually relocated to California where she raised her two daughters Carla and Diane and led a productive and meaningful life. She worked hard to ensure that they received the educations that would make their future lives better and, in more cases than not, put the well being of others ahead of herself. In addition to her parents and brother Thaddeus, Jessica was predeceased by her brother Joseph (formally Bruno), her husband Edward Marcinek and her adopted parents Sam and Betty Dziuban. She is survived by her daughters Carla Warner (Jeffery) of Clifton, Virginia and Diane Davidson (William) of Rancho Cucamonga; two granddaughters: Lauren and Delynn Davidson of Wildomar and Murietta, respectively; a grandson David Marcinek (Mireyah) of Los Angeles and two greatgrandsons: Jack and Benicio Marcinek. She also leaves behind a stepsister, Barbara Farina of Lower Burrell, Pa and a stepbrother, Thomas Dziuban of Edgewater, MD. Jessica was a loving, thoughtful Mother & Grandmother and Greatgrandmother. She gave far more than she ever expected in return and did her best under a continuum of difficult circumstances. She deserves to be remembered with much love, respect and admiration. She was a “Survivor”.