Agnes Oleynik was born into a Roman Catholic family in , a small town on the western fringes of Dorsten (into which it was formally subsumed in 1943), a mid-sized mining and industrial town north of Essen, a short distance to the east of the Dutch frontier and Nijmegen. She was enrolled at the local Catholic school in 1932. War broke out when she was 13 and troops were stationed at the school: teaching immediately became more "irregular" ("... sehr unregelmäßig"), especially after the children were sent to take part in combined classes at one of the two nearby protestant schools. She completed her schooling young, with others in her cohort, in the Spring of 1940, and was conscripted into the Labour Service ("Reichsarbeitsdienst"). She was later sent to work in a munitions factory. After war ended, in May 1945, she worked as a volunteer nurse before moving on to complete an apprenticeship as a carer at the "Westfalia Welfare College" ("Westfälische Wohlfahrtsschule") in Münster.