Zofia+Baniecka

=Early Life= Zofia Baniecka was born to a culture-rich mother and father in Warsaw, Poland during 1917. Zofia’s family was not religious, but she attended “the finest Catholic school”(Baniecka, Frontline) with, surprisingly, many Jewish students. Her father was a sculptor, her mother was a teacher and both had many Jewish friends. Many intellectual debates about politics and war, among other things, occurred at her home between her parents and their colleagues. One of Zofia’s good friends in school was a Jew named Ruth Curtin, whom she later helped save during the holocaust. Zofia was an only child and had lived in the same house her whole life, until the Nazi regime fell upon Poland and forced her family to move, so the land their house was on could be used as part of a ghetto. Her liberal and cultured upbringing affected her choices her entire life.

=Holocaust Involvement=

All of the family’s Jewish friends were placed in ghettos, and Zofia’s father was killed by an airstrike when he was trying to smuggle books and food to one of his Jewish colleagues. Zofia was always an independent spirit, and was never too inclined to respect authority, especially an oppressive authority, such as Hitler. A friend asked Zofia to join the resistance, and she heartily agreed, her mother also joined. In her words, “I was itching to do something. I was afraid, but I had to do it. I saw the whole Jewish population wearing yellow armbands. I saw beatings on the street of old Jews, of children, shootings, the most horrible sights.”(Baniecka, Frontline). She began as a messenger for the underground press and her mother smuggled guns and gunpowder to resistors in her shopping bags, “Nobody would ever suspect that a small gray-haired woman would be carrying a gun in her shopping bag.”(Baniecka, Frontline). The underground found Zofia and her mother a large apartment and they started hiding Jews in it in the winter of 1941.

=Holocaust Incident= The apartment the resistance acquired for Zofia and her mother had four large rooms plus a kitchen. Each of the four rooms were divided into four sections with curtains and there was a different Jewish family behind each curtain. Throughout her years of saving Jews in Nazi occupied Poland, Zofia hid at least fifty Jews in her home and found hiding places for countless others among her underground contacts. Her home was filled at the time that her old school friend Ruth Curtin came to her door, begging for a hiding place, but she took her in anyway, because she found it hard to send strangers to other homes and impossible to send away friends to anyone other than herself. During a ghetto uprising near her apartment an entire ghetto was set ablaze, and a family of ten barely managed to escape the flames with their lives intact. They found their way to Zofia’s door and she welcomed them and hid them for weeks on end, until she could find them a more suitable place to stay for such a large family.

=Why She Was a Hero= Amazingly, Zofia was never caught.”I was never interrogated or nearly caught, though I don't know why. Many fellow resistance leaders perished in prison. I was just lucky. Luck, it's only luck, because I kept people and guns in my house from the winter of 1941 until the Polish uprising in August 1944.”(Baniecka, Frontline). She continued hiding people until the Polish uprising of 1944, and made the threat of death even more imminent to her, if caught, by hiding guns in her house. At the time of the Nazi Regime, it meant certain death to find even one gun in a private home, nonetheless several, along with several Jewish families.

Zofia Baniecka had a very unique reason for hiding Jews, which makes her different from any other “Holocaust Heroes”. She was not religious, so felt no obligations to her faith when she saved these people. She was not Jewish, nor particularly oppressed herself. So why did she help all of those Jewish families? Because they were her friends. Zofia Baniecka had no prejudice toward the Jewish before, after, or during the holocaust, and was friends with many Jews from before the reign of Hitler, many of whom her and her parents helped during the Holocaust. She, like so many others. risked everything they had, everything that they ever worked for, to save people that she knew almost nothing about, the only thing she knew was that they were being wrongly persecuted for doing nothing. Through learning about this incredibly courageous woman, I have learned that the only thing that you need to make a difference is bravery, kindness, and an unrelenting urge to do what’s right.



Works Cited “Rescuers: Zofia Baniecka.”PBS Frontline.The Public Broadcasting Company,2014.Web.5 Dec.2014 Surach, Stephanie. “Zofia Baniecka, Poland.”Raoul Wallenberg. The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.Web.5 Dec.2014. “Zofia Baniecka Sits Outside With a Friend.”United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.Web.Dec. 2014.

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