Our deepest sympathy to the family of
Dr. Alina Golka
who passed away in Warsaw, Poland on November 16, 2014.
She will be missed by her friends and Polish community in Houston.
Dr. Alina Golka, engineer, beloved mother, grandmother and great grandmother was born in Poland on March 25, 1924.
She is survived by two sons, six grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.
Alina Golka was a civil engineer and one of the early proponents of developing and implementing computer technology into Structural Engineering in Poland as early as 1966. “She knew FORTRAN,” stated a close family friend in a similar profession in admiration of Alina Golka’s knowledge of this early computer language that has long since been forgotten.
Her life is best summarized by her grandson Tomasz’s post on Facebook:
I am very sad to share with everyone that on Sunday, November 16, 2014, my grandmother Alina Golka died in Warsaw, Poland. Babcia Alina (“babcia” means “grandma” in Polish) lived an amazing life – she was 90 years old. She was a brilliant woman – an engineer with a PHD, a world traveler, an avid hiker and skier in her day, brought up two brilliant sons, six grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. She made a tremendous, altruistic sacrifice in making sure that both of her sons got out from behind the Iron Curtain and left Poland to settle in the West (my father Jerzy in the United States, and my uncle Jan in Germany). Although she suffered from memory loss and various health problems recently, what I will always remember about her is not that. I will always remember how Babcia Alina sat next to me in my bed when I was little and rubbed my hand when I was sick, how she played cards with me, how we picked the delicious, rare Polish berries called poziomki in her summer home in Wilga, how she baked the greatest makowce (poppy seed cakes) in the world, how she took me to the South of Poland in 1990, where she was from: Zywiec and its surroundings, the Tatra Mountains, Krakow, Wieliczka, and the stories she told me of her youth, the war, and playing soccer with a young man named Karol Wojtyla (who later became Pope John Paul II). I am so fortunate to have known her for 39 years.
