Maria Nowak

Maria Nowak, née Bożek, was born in Cracow in 1920, to a family of railway workers. In the girls’ high school that she went to, there were students with different backgrounds – Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. However, religion and provenience weren’t really important for them as they all considered themselves first and foremost Polish. Maria’s best friend was a Jewish girl, Helena Goldstein. They remained friends even as they went on to study at different universities. Maria studied Mathematics at the Jagiellonian University while Helena chose the College of Commerce. After the first year at university, however, their education was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Maria took up a job at a drapery in Cracow. Helena’s family was forced to live in the ghetto that was established in Cracow in March 1941. Her father was deported to the Bełżec death camp with the first transport from the ghetto and killed.
Being a railway worker, Maria’s father knew about the trains which left the city towards an unknown destination, full of people, and then came back empty. Maria passed on all this information to her friends in the ghetto. She also helped them by smuggling food and medicine into the ghetto.

In October 1942, Helena Goldstein’s mother and brother were taken to the Bełżec concentration camp and killed. When Maria heard about that, she decided to help Helena escape from the ghetto. She managed to buy an empty “kennkarte” (ID card) and wrote her own personal information in it, but pasted a picture of Helena instead. She also attached her own baptism certificate and high school diploma to the “kennkarte.”

Helena belonged to a work crew that worked outside the ghetto, so it was easier for her to flee. At a settled time, Maria approached Helena and took the Star of David armband off her in a way that nobody would notice. She also put a fur collar around Helena’s neck so that nobody would suspect she was Jewish. According to a law that had been introduced in December 1941, Jews were not allowed to possess any fur items. All their furs and warm clothes were taken away and sent to the German military.

After escaping from the ghetto, Helena hid at Maria’s friends’ place until she decided to move to Warsaw. There, with her false ID that claimed she was Maria, she got a job at the central train station, where she announced the arrival of trains in Polish and in German. Shortly before the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, she was taken to Germany as a forced labourer. She survived and returned to Cracow in 1945. The two friends found each other again and remained friends until Helena’s death.

Maria went on to study pharmacy and obtained her Ph.D. In the beginning of the 1950’s, she got a job at “The Eagle Pharmacy” owned by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.

In 1995, Maria Nowak was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations herself. In 2007, she was also awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, and in 2020, on her 100th birthday, she was awarded the “100 Years of Polish Independence” medal.

For many years, Maria Nowak would share her story with young people in order to educate them and attract their attention to evil and human suffering.
She died in Cracow on 6th November 2020.

AUTORKA: Larysa Michalska

Polarization

At this stage, there is a differentiation in the attitudes of people belonging to given groups towards certain types of problems. Using hateful propaganda, extremists divide people, which usually creates two camps – those against and those in favor of solving a given social problem. The process of polarization very often contributes to the outbreak and escalation of social conflicts. Paradoxically, people with moderate views who are members of the perpetrators’ group have the greatest ability to stop genocide, which is why they are usually arrested and murdered first. The dominant group establishes unlimited power for itself by introducing states of emergency or ruling by decree, abolishing civil rights and liberties. The victim group is disarmed so that it cannot defend itself and the dominant group can take full control.
To prevent polarization, human rights groups and organizations must be supported and international sanctions must be put in place.

How does this person’s story illustrate response to the particular stage of genocide in Dr. Stanton’s theory?

From early childhood on, Maria Nowak had friends with different cultural and religious backgrounds. To her, this diversity was something entirely natural. As tensions and conflicts escalated between the Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of Cracow, she did not succumb to the propaganda that was meant to set both groups against each other. During the German occupation, as the ghetto was established in order to separate the Jewish community from society and polarise both sides even more, Maria opposed the Nazi legislation and did her best to help her Jewish friends instead.