Vale Witolda Stelmachowska

Witolda Stelmachowska was born in Warsaw on 13th October 1923. During World War II, she lived with her mother Irena and sister Aleksandra at 20 Gomółki Street in Żoliborz. Her mother was active in the underground. At the time, her father Stanisław was in Great Britain, working in the London offices of the Polish Government-in-Exile.

At the end of 1942 or the beginning of 1943, the Stelmachowski family took into their home escapees from the Lwów ghetto - Ewa Schutz and her son Jan. From the start, they were aware that they were hiding Jews. These new residents lived in a ground floor room with a view out onto the garden. They could move freely around the apartment and Jan became a student at a school for children of uniformed servicemen.

“The Germans dropped into our flat on Good Friday 1944 and conducted a search. Because it was dawn, five in the morning, Mum had put Janek and my sister to bed. When the Germans opened the door, Mum, said, ‘And the children sleep here’. So the German closed the door and left”, recalled Witolda Stelmachowska, during interviews conducted in 2009 and 2014 for the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

The Stelmachowski and Schutz families lived together until the Warsaw Uprising, when fate separated them during their stay in the Pruszków transit camp.

In 1947, Dr Maxymilian Schutz wrote to the Stelmachowski family. In that letter, he thanked them for helping his wife and son. “Ewa told me a great deal – how you shared everything, how you cared for them and their welfare, despite the fact that everything was difficult in those times”, he wrote. “I never expected that my family would survive that terrible occupation or that I would ever see them alive again. Nonetheless, a miracle occurred and I know that it was, in large measure, due to your heroism and your kind heart.”

On 28th December 1988, Irena and Witolda Stelmachowska were honoured with the title of Righteous Among the Nations. Read more about their story of rescue.