Kłapa Stanisława

Kłapa, Stanisława In 1936 Miriam and Moshe Krynski, a Jewish family living in Warsaw with their small daughter, Barbara, hired a housekeeper by the name of Stanisława Kłapa, a Polish woman from a small village nearby. When the war broke out, they had to escape the capital. The Krynskis took only what they could carry and left the apartment and all that was in it in Stanisława’s care, including the secret place where they kept their valuables. The Krynskis escaped to Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania). The conditions there, however, were no better than what they would have experienced had they stayed in Warsaw. When news of their lamentable state reached Stanisława, she set out on foot, for a distance of 500 kilometers, to convince them to return. They would not do it. She told them that the apartment had been destroyed by the Germans, but she had managed to remove their valuables and was keeping them safe. Soon after Stanisława’s departure for Warsaw, Moshe Krynski was captured and killed by the Germans, leaving Miriam to fend for herself and her daughter, who by then was 6 years old. Again Stanisława came to try and fetch them. This time Miriam agreed to accept her help. They managed to get to Warsaw, largely due to the false identification papers that Stanisława had procured at great effort and expense. According to these papers, Miriam was an unmarried Polish woman, and Barbara was Stanisława’s niece. Back in Warsaw, after a failed attempt to find safety within the ghetto, which was on the brink of liquidation, Stanisława found a hideout in the home of a Polish woman named Maria Staff in a village called Zalesie, 30 kilometers away. It is unclear whether Maria knew that they were Jewish, but they had to pay to stay with her. Stanisława paid by selling their things, and when those ran out, she worked hard to earn the necessary funds; she did this throughout the years that they stayed there, until the liberation. After the war, the three women went to live together in Łódź. Soon, however, Miriam decided that her daughter needed a Zionist education, and she decided to immigrate to Israel although she knew that parting from Stanisława would be very difficult. They tried to stay in touch, but the thought of Stanisława’s difficult life in Socialist Poland weighed heavily on their minds. They tried to get her to come to Israel, and they succeeded in doing so in 1961. Stanisława made a home for herself in the Polish House in Jerusalem. As a devout Catholic she was happy to live out the rest of her years near the sacred sites of Christianity. On April 2, 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Stanisława Kłapa as Righteous Among the Nations.