Before the war, Halina would often shop in Jewish stores despite those who called on people to boycott them. Halina and Wanda Gottlieb were classmates at the Zofia Sierpińska Junior High School for girls, and they ended up on opposite sides of the wall separating the ghetto from the rest of Warsaw. In order to provide food, medicine and saccharine to Wanda, Halina would bribe the guards or sometimes don the Star of David armband. On one occasion the guards would not let her out, so she spent the night in the ghetto, where she saw a German firing squad execute the elderly. On another occasion she only just managed to avoid being captured in a round-up.
Shortly before the planned liquidation of the ghetto, the women decided Wanda would stay with Halina and her mother, under a false name. Wanda, called ‘Jadwiga’ from that moment on, didn’t have a special hiding spot in the house. All three took Sunday walks together and on several occasions, Jadwiga escaped being blackmailed.
“She was so confident that when she came here, she made a living by delivering cakes, from which she would earn 10 zlotys,” Halina Koczorowska recalls.
All three survived the Uprising, and afterwards Jadwiga decided to go to work in Germany. She told Halina:
“It will be much easier for me to hide there than here.”
She returned after the war and settled in Łódź. The two women continue to maintain their friendship.
“I say: ‘Jadwiga, how are you doing after all those years?’”
“And she says: ‘I don’t think about it. I have a daughter, and I have my grandson Grześ. I don’t have the time to think about it.’”
