Natalia Skotnicka and her daughter Hanna ran a haberdashery called “Młynek” on ul. Królewska in Warsaw. They also had a quilt factory on ul.Radzymińska, where, in 1938, Countess Zofia Czerniakowska, a doctor, came to buy a trousseau for her daughter Lechosława. And thus began a friendship between the two families, which lasted throughout the War.
Natalia Skotnicka died from typhus in 1939 or 1940 but, before she died, she asked the Czerniakowski family to care for some of her valuable objects. The Skotnicki family pre-War housekeeper and nanny Janka (Ewa Janina Wójcicka) traded good and, with the money she made, she bought food, which she then smuggled into the ghetto for Hanna and her siblings, Aleksander and teenage Renata. In addition to food, she also sent medicines which were provided by Zofia Czerniakowska.
At the beginning of 1942, Aleksander Skotnicki helped Renata to escape from the ghetto. His friend Paweł Gołąbek, a navy-blue [Polish] policeman, pretending to arrest her, took the girl from the “the Aryan side”, where she worked. He kept her temporarily hidden in his apartment on ul Kacza 21 and her former nanny began looking for somewhere safer to hide her.
After about six weeks, Renata Skotnicka came to live in a house at ul. Łochowska 53A, which belonged to the Czerniakowski family. Thanks to his connections in the Home Army [AK], Count Czerniakowski obtained a false birth certificate for the girl in the name of the deceased Irena Krystyna Podbielska. His daughter then provided Hanna Skotnicka with documents, which enabled her to work as an "Aryan” and to rent a room in the attic of a tenement at ul. Barska 10.
The Czerniakowski family never demanded any compensation for the help offered to the Jews. “They risked their lives for friends”, Renata Skotnicka emphasised in a statement deposited in the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute.
Unfortunately, their activity in the Home Army increased the risk of discovering the child in hiding. Moreover, a German moved into the tenement building, and the nosy caretaker threatened to inform on them.
In December 1942, Ewa Janina Wójcicka took Renata to a village near Radzymin. She, herself, returned to Warsaw to help Aleksander. She was killed while attempting to get him out of the ghetto.
Soon after, Renata was denounced by one of the peasants and she was arrested. She managed to escape and hide at her sister home on ul. Barska. Unfortunately, she soon again found herself at the police station. Thanks to the money offered by “Żegota”, she was released. However she was mentally exhausted and returned to the ghetto.
Soon before the Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, after being persuaded by her brother, Renata reached the “Aryan side”, via a sewer, where Paweł Gołąbek again helped her.
Before long, having been caught in a street round-up, she ended up in Nazi hands. “We tried to set her free, but the transport she was in had already left”, wrote Lechosława Ostrowska. As a Pole, the girl was sent to a labour camp in Mulheim. Lechosława wrote letters to her in order to avert suspicion about her Jewish descent and to inform her about her siblings. The Nazis sent Hanna Skotnicka to the same camp and the sisters stayed there until the end of the War.
In 1948, Renata Skotnicka went to Canada. “After the war, I could not spend even a single night here. Nightmares. I just wanted to run away and forget. But it didn’t worked out that way. It is so deeply rooted in my memory, that it is impossible to forget. I can only live with this pain”, she explained in the film “Dziewczyna i chłopak” (“A Girl and a Boy”).
Contact with the Czerniakowski family broke off after the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. Following the War, they moved to Żegań, in the southern part of Poland. It was not until 1995 that Renata Skotnicka managed to find them.
