Imperial War Museum London

Maria was born a Catholic in Zakopane, a mountain resort in the south of Poland. She was 14 when the war broke out. German soldiers were sent to Zakopane for rest and recuperation, and at first relations with the townspeople were good. The first trouble came in 1940, when all the town’s Jews were forced to move into the Kraków ghetto. Several of Maria’s friends were Jewish; she never saw them again. Early in 1942, after young people started to be rounded up for forced labour, Maria’s parents decided to send her to stay with her aunt in Warsaw. In 1943, she was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the notorious Pawiak prison, within the walls of the ghetto.

Maria was in the prison when the ghetto Uprising broke out: she could see burning buildings all around her, and people jumping from windows to escape the flames. From the Pawiak prison, she was sent to Auschwitz and there assigned to a group who were made to do pointless work, carrying stones from one place to another for no reason, purely to break their spirits. Later, because she was young and healthy, she was assigned to do physical labour outside the camp. That meant walking for miles every day, wearing ill-fitting clogs, then working from 6 am until 5 pm each day, with only a half-hour break. Food at the camp consisted of no more than a cup of acorn coffee in the morning, a bowl of thin soup at midday and a slice of bread in the evening. However, non-Jewish prisoners were allowed to receive a package from their families once a month, and that helped to save Maria’s life. She traded some of the food she received for a decent pair of shoes: if the clogs had crippled her, she would not have survived.

In January 1945, with Auschwitz about to fall into the hands of the Red Army, Maria was evacuated westward. She had to march for three days, the road strewn with the bodies of marchers who had preceded her. Then her group was loaded onto cattle trucks and transported to the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. With the end of the war near, conditions at the camp were chaotic: there was no food, and many prisoners were being shot. Maria was fortunate to be transferred to a sub camp, and then to Buchenwald, near Weimar. Finally, she was forced to march back East, into Czech territory.

She and three friends managed to avoid the guard dogs and escape from the march, surviving for two weeks in the woods on nettles and grass, until some Polish farm-workers found them and gave them clothes. They pretended to be refugees from the bombing of Dresden, and were given jobs on the farm. In that way, they survived until the end of the war. Not wanting to go to Communist Poland, they made their way to the US occupation zone by pretending to be French, and were eventually transferred to a British camp for displaced persons.