Anna Marie Zweck Boberg, 85

It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Anna Marie Zweck Boberg, 85, who died peacefully on Dec. 29, 2025, surrounded by her family. She passed after a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer and the challenges of cognitive decline in the last three years. 

Anna Marie Zweck was born in February 1940 in Cieszyn, Poland, months after the start of World War II. Her father was the town judge and a reserve officer in the Polish Army. Before Anna was born, he was captured and imprisoned as a POW in Germany for six years. Anna didn’t meet her father until she was fifteen years old. 

Anna was raised by her mother Emilia and great-aunt Marie in Cieszyn. Anna often said that her guardian angel "worked overtime" during her childhood in war-torn Poland in the 1940s and early 1950s. At just 3 years old, she suffered severe burns over half her body after falling into a tub of boiling water; while most scars healed, one larger one remained under her whole right arm. During the months of hospitalization, she contracted many diseases, resulting in permanent hearing loss in her left ear. Her mother was told to keep Anna hidden away at home as a blonde, blue-eyed child for fear of being kidnapped for the Nazi Lebensborn project. As a child, she also survived scarlet fever and even a poisonous snake bite. 

Her family endured repeated occupations of their home — first by a Nazi officer during the German occupation, then by Russian soldiers during the Soviet invasion, when her mother and aunt were forced to cook and clean for them. Anna’s home address on the main town square changed names from Reneck to Adolf Hitler Platz and then to Stalin Platz as the invaders changed. Anna’s father was a vocal opponent of socialism/communism both before and after the war, which made it impossible for him to return to Poland once it fell under Soviet control. Determined to reunite his family, he arranged for an underground group to help his wife and daughter escape. On the night of the planned escape, 8-year-old Anna was very ill with a high fever and could not go. The group that attempted the escape was captured and never heard from again. 

After the war, Anna’s father got sponsorship and a guaranteed job in the United States by befriending an American he had worked with in Germany doing investigations for the Nuremberg war crimes trials. He first arrived in New York City, but high housing costs led him west to Kalispell, after reconnecting with Bill Riley, a U.S. Air Force pilot he had met in Germany, who said his father could give him a job at his Glacier Dairy in Montana. From 1949 to 1955, Anna’s father wrote daily letters to senators, officials, newspapers and anyone who might help free his family from Poland. Hundreds of these eloquent, heartbreaking letters survive today, including extensive correspondence with former Montana Senator Mike Mansfield. 

Finally, in 1955, Anna, then 15, and her mother (age 45) arrived in New York City to a remarkable reception, meeting her father, greeted by reporters and photographers from the Associated Press and The New York Times. They were among the first Polish citizens allowed to leave communist controlled Poland after Stalin’s death. 

Anna began high school in Kalispell, speaking only Polish, Russian and some German. The culture shock was difficult, and she remembered hiding in bathroom stalls to cry. Fortunately, a group of girls soon took her under their wing, and she found her footing. At 17, she met the love of her life in a church basement playing Ping-Pong, classmate Bill Boberg — a love that would span nearly seven decades. 

Anna worked summers at Lake McDonald Lodge in Glacier National Park while Bill served as a seasonal firefighter for the Forest Service. Both attended Montana State in Bozeman. Anna got a double major in Home Economics and Russian, and Bill geology. Anna often noted that had she remained in Poland, she would have been on track to become a pharmacist. 

Anna and Bill married in 1962, and Bill joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after they both graduated from Montana State in 1963. They moved to Germany, and Anna taught GED classes to enlisted soldiers. 

Their children, Richard and Tracy, were born there while they lived on the Wildflecken US Army Base. Wildflecken was once a Nazi SS training camp and later the largest displaced-persons camp for Polish refugees after World War II. 

Following Bill’s deployment to Vietnam in 1967, Anna and the children returned to Kalispell to live with her parents. 

After Bill's much anticipated return in 1968, the family moved to Boulder, Colorado, for Bill’s graduate studies at CU. Always eager for adventure, after graduation, they accepted a geology position in Chile, but political upheaval and the nationalization of the mining industry in Chile forced them to stay in the US. 

They ultimately settled in Casper, Wyoming, where they raised their children. Anna taught ninth-grade science and home economics at East Junior High for 15 years. She loved their family time at their cozy A-frame mountain cabin on Casper Mountain, cross-country and downhill skiing, weekend picnics, camping, boating and especially skiing under a full moon. 

In the late 1980s, Bill and Anna moved to Liberia, West Africa, and later to Ethiopia in the mid 1990s for Bill's mineral exploration work. They lost all their belongings when their home was looted during the Liberian civil war. Yet Anna considered those years in Africa as the time of her life, exploring Africa on safari and coming alongside Bill’s geological work. Anna loved her time with the missionaries at ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) mission compound in Monrovia, Liberia and the expat community. Anna always found solace watching the ocean on the African beaches. 

Anna was Bill’s happy adventure partner, traveling and exploring the world together. Anna was able to go back to Poland several times and reconnect with family there over the years. She was an avid reader and loved dinners and games with family and friends. 

Anna is survived by her devoted husband Bill Boberg, with whom she shared 63 years of marriage; two children, five grandchildren, and soon-to-be nine great-grandchildren. 

Her surviving family includes son, Richard Zweck Boberg and daughter-in-law, Cheryl, and grandchildren, CJ (husband, Ross and children, Adeline, Hazel and Charlie); Christina (fiance, Blake and children, Aveline and Nash) and Bill (wife, Kayleigh and son, Bridger). 

She is also survived by her daughter, Tracy Ann Nichols and son-in-law, David and grandchildren, Emily Marie and Anna (husband, Justin and son, Francis, with twins arriving soon). She is also survived by her cousin, Ewa Lastowiecka and her husband, Jozef, in Warsaw, Poland. 

A funeral service will be held in Kalispell at 11 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 12, at St. Matthew’s Catholic Church, with interment to follow at the Conrad Memorial Cemetery next to her father and mother. Johnson-Gloschat Funeral Home is caring for the family.