She was born in Cracow as a love-child of Adam Vetulani and Anna Szewczyk, she was a half-sister of Jerzy and January Vetulani. She studied several foreign languages, first French, and later German, as her son said, heeding her father"s advice: "Learn your enemy"s language".
During the occupation, after World World War II started in 1939, she attended to underground classes.
Raised in a Catholic family, by the age of five she lived in the country. Then she moved to the city to start education in the elementary school. During the war her family adopted a Jewish woman, saving her from the Nazis.
In 1942 Kristine was taken to Germany to work as slave laborer in the Nazis" factory.
She first worked at Hamewacker Chewing Tobacco in Nordhausen and was later sent to the ammunition factory Schmidt, Kranz & Company She worked as kitchen help and as an interpreter.
She was also a maid in the household of the company owner before she was liberated in 1945. Vetulani started studying romance philology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, but she didn"t graduate from the university.
She decided to leave Europe as she was full of anxiety, being afraid of possibility of another Soviet-German war.
In 1951 she emigrated to the United States, settling in Saint Louis, where she attended Washington University. After moving to Maryland, she graduated from Frostburg State Teachers College in 1962, in 1966 she earned a master"s degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont. Shortly after graduating from Frostburg College she began work at Woodlawn High School, where she taught French, German and Spanish.
She retired in 1988.
Anyhow, the retirement wasn"t the end of her life work. Having no longer regular labour as a teacher Vetulani decided to become the volunteer of Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where she has been translating historical documents. She also worked in the Tracing Bureau of the American Red Cross, attempting to reunite Holocaust survivors with their families.
As she lived in America, Kristine continued large letter correspondence with her father in Poland (until Adam Vetulani"s death in 1976).
Their son, Charles, is an architect and writer She published three memoir books (in Polish):
West małym niemieckim miasteczku (In a Little German Town, published by Tasso, Krakow 1993).
A German translation titled In einem deutschen Städtchen was published in 2000;
Z Ziemi Egipskiej, z domu niewoli… (From Egyptian Land, From the House of Slavery…, Czuwajmy, Krakow 1997);
Ameryka. Marzenie a rzeczywistość (America Dream and Reality, Czuwajmy, Krakow 2000).
Eva Kristine Vetulani-Belfoure died on 25 March 2004 of heart failure at Northwest Hospital Center in Randallstown, Baltimore.
Her son remembered that despite the fact "she had seen the absolute worst in life, people executed in front of her eyes, she had an amazingly cheerful disposition and outlook on life".
