Stanisław Sierpiński was born as Wiktor (Wigdor Nusym) Margulies in Nastaszów (Tarnopol County), in eastern Galicia. His father, Wilhelm Goliger, and mother Anna Margulies, owned a manor estate. In his interview for the Yad Vashem Institute in 1969, Sierpiński described his family as “a Jewish family of farmers from time immemorial”.
In 1927, Sierpiński graduated from junior high school in Tarnopol and then went to study medicine in Nancy, France. Upon his return to Poland, he managed to have his degree recognized in 1934 and, in 1936, he obtained a job at the “Zofiówka” psychiatric hospital in Otwock near Warsaw, where he met Emma Fiebig, who worked as a nurse there. Although he was not a member of the Communist Party of Poland (Polish: Polska Partia Komunistyczna, PPK), he was active in International Red Aid.
At the beginning of September 1939, follwoing the German invasion of Poland, Sierpiński went east and stayed in his home village until January 1940. From the early 1940, until the attack of the Third Reich on the Soviet Union, he worked at the psychiatric hospital in the Kleparów (Ukr. Klepariv), in in the Lwów (Ukr. Lviv) district.
In November 1941, Sierpiński was transported from Lwów to Warsaw with the help of a nurse from the “Zofiówka” Sanatorium. He found himself in the Warsaw ghetto. He was active in the Society for Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Populace in Poland (Polish: Towarzystwo Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej w Polsce, TOZ), where he was responsible for sleeping quarters for those displaced to the ghetto. Between May and August 1942, he was employed at the Czyste district hospital, in the urology ward headed by Dr. Eufemiusz Herman. In the ghetto, he joined the Polish Workers' Party (Polish: Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR) and was active in its underground structures under the pseudonym “Felek”.
When the great liquidation operation in the Warsaw ghetto began, Emma Fiebig-Jasiczek offered to help him escape. In his interview for Yad Vashem, Sierpiński summarised his escape to the “Aryan” side" in August 1942:
“I was pulled out by a Volksdeutsch woman, who had worked with me in Otwock. From some nurse, she had found out that I was in the ghetto and she pulled me out. She was a wonderful human being. Her name is Emma Fibik, and she is alive today. [...]
"Back then, in August 1942, she came to the ghetto with a note that said two Jews were needed for work in a factory and she pulled out me and the wife of that Polish nurse. She took me into her home.”
Emma supplied Sierpiński with counterfeit documents. After leaving her apartment, Sierpiński joined the partisan units in Lublin.
In the late 1942, Emma was arrested and put in a concentration camp. According to Sierpiński, she was given a five-year sentence for aiding Jews.
Until the entry of Soviet troops into the Praga district in September 1944, Sierpiński was active in the underground structures of the People's Guard, then the People's Army in Warsaw and partisan units in the field, including in the vicinity of Łowicz and Puławy.
Before the Warsaw Uprising broke out, he was appointed head of sanitation for the Praga district within the structures of the People's Army. In the clandestine apartment he occupied in 1944, where weapons and underground publications were stored, he met his future wife Wiera Baksztańska, who was also hiding on the “Aryan” side.
On 14th September 1944, Sierpiński was appointed to head the Department of Health of the Warsaw Municipal Authority, then head of personnel at the Warsaw Committee of the Polish Workers' Party.
After the War, he married Wiera. He was appointed Deputy Director and, in 1950, Director of the Infant Jesus Hospital. At the same time, he worked in the Department of Neurosurgery as an assistant, assistant professor and associate professor.
In July 1966, he took up the post of faculty professor at the Medical University in Warsaw, head of the neurological department of the Polish Academy of Sciences and faculty professor at the neurosurgery clinic of the Medical University. As a result of antisemitic purges, he was removed from the position as Deputy Dean of the Medical University in September 1968.
Sierpiński and his wife migrated to Israel, where he worked in the neurosurgical ward of the Rambam hospital in Haifa.
Interviewed in Haifa in 1969, Sierpiński briefly mentioned his relationship with Emma Fiebig: “After the war, I found out she was alive. I had her rehabilitated very quickly (she was on the Volksdeutsch list)”. According to other accounts, she refused to sign the Volksliste in spite of her German origin.
In 1986, the Yad Vashem Institute decided to honour Emma Fiebig-Jasiczek with the title of "Righteous Among the Nations".
