A YOUNG Polish mother who touched the hearts of Limerick people when she told her tragic story in her online blog, The Snow Princess, has lost her battle with terminal leukaemia. Mother-of-one Marta Salacka (27) passed away on Monday, January 14 in a hospital in Germany close to her hometown of Gorzow Wielkopolski on the German-Polish border. A fundraising campaign held late last year raised over €40,000, which paid for an air ambulance to grant Ms Salacka’s dying wish to return to Poland.
Family friend Monika Habrych told Limerick Post: “It’s very sad what happened to that family. We all feel sad but at least she doesn’t feel anymore pain. We had a Polish Mass on Monday (January 14) when 150 to 200 people turned up.The funeral will be on Saturday in Gorzow Wielkopolski at 11.45am.
“The family are all destroyed over the leukaemia, what she went through and the death. I can’t even find words to describe it”, she said.
Ms Salacka and her husband Mariusz had spent seven years in Limerick and lived in Castleconnell with their four-year-old son Nikodem.
The young mother had been diagnosed with terminal leukaemia in the autumn of 2012 and was given weeks to live.
She had undergone chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant after being diagnosed in the spring and was receiving treatment in Germany before she died.
After receiving her diagnosis, Ms Salacka began an online blog in Polish called ‘The Snow Princess’, in which she wrote of her wish to establish a charity for people with serious illnesses.
Ms Salacka wrote: “I would like to make a promise that if I get miraculously cured and manage to fight the illness my priority will be to establish an organisation that would help the ill. This is my dream and thinking about it makes me smile. If after the treatment there is some money left, I will invest it in my dream.”
A remembrance service for Ms Salacka will be held in St Michael’s Church on Thursday, January 31 at 7pm.
