Nawrocka Leokadia ; Daughter: Maria

Nawrocka, Leokadia Nawrocka, Maria Janina Nebel was about five years old when she and her mother were moved from Katowice to the Chrzanów ghetto. To keep herself and her daughter alive, Janina’s mother obtained food by bartering miscellaneous items with Polish women who visited the ghetto, and this is how she made the acquaintance of Leokadia Nawrocka, also from Katowice. At first they interacted only as traders, but when their relationship became stronger Nebel asked Nawrocka to rescue her daughter by removing her from the ghetto. In one of the liquidation Aktionen in 1942, Janina’s mother perished and the girl’s aunt handed her to Nawrocka, who entered the ghetto especially to claim her. Nawrocka kept young Janina in her home for the next three months and, to keep her identity secret, did not allow her to go into the street. When Janina became ill one day, the doctor whom Nawrocka had called, who was about to prescribe medicine, identified her by her Jewish last name, which was shared by a well-known family in Chrzanów. The doctor promised to keep the secret but warned Nawrocka that it would be risky to continue sheltering her. Under these circumstances, Nawrocka decided to place Janina in hiding with her relatives. For more than two years, Janina migrated under an assumed name among Nawrocka’s relatives in various locations. Nawrocka tasked her oldest daughter Maria with escorting and caring for Janina, and the eighteen-year-old took Janina from place to place, raised her spirits, and persuaded relatives to take her in. In the autumn of 1944, when they ran out of relatives’ addresses and the two had nowhere else to go, Maria rented a room and kept Janina there until the end of the war, working to support herself and her ward and caring for Janina as a mother would. After the occupation, Janina remembered the kindness that Leokadia and her daughter Maria had shown her by risking their lives on her behalf. Janina had become strongly attached to Maria during the occupation, and after she settled in Israel, she sent her rescuer parcels and medicines and made sure that she would receive institutional support in her old age. On April 14, 1985, Yad Vashem recognized Maria Nawrocka and her mother, Leokadia Nawrocka, as Righteous Among the Nations.