Sobolewski Walerian & Sobolewska Anastazja (Kośmina)& Sobolewska Anastazja (Kutuzowa)

Walerian and Anastazja Sobolewski Maria Wierzbowska Inka Grynszpan was born in Warsaw on July 31, 1939, to Tadeusz and Halina (née Zylberbart). The next year, the family was incarcerated in the ghetto, where they stayed until March 1943, not long before the ghetto uprising. Before being taken to Umschlagplatz, Halina and Tadeusz managed to hide four-year-old Inka in a sewage pipe. There she was discovered by some workers employed by Walerian Sobolewski. The workers somehow knew to take the little girl to the home of Wanda Bruno-Niczowa, a Polish teacher and acquaintance of her parents, who was also hiding her cousins’ child. When Walerian’s wife Anastazja heard that a pretty little girl was being hidden there, she decided try and adopt Inka, as she and her husband were childless. At Niczowa's home in Żoliborz, they finally met the blue-eyed, blonde-haired beautiful Inka. They were determined to look after her, but as she was dressed in rags, she drew unwanted attention from onlookers as they travelled home by wagon. The Sobolewskis made an effort to speak loudly about their "cousins sending their daughter to the doctor" dressed in an embarrassing way. Luckily, they were not denounced and got home safely. After a while, a Russian neighbor told Anastazja that she suspected that Inka was Jewish. This was very dangerous, so the Sobolewskis asked Niczowa to formally register Inka (under the name of Joanna Kwiecińska) at the G. P. Baudouin Home for Infants in Warsaw. The papers obtained from the home allowed the Sobolewskis to keep up the pretense of having legally adopted a Polish child. In 1943, Walerian was arrested and incarcerated in Pawiak Prison, which was extremely stressful and frightening to his wife, but he survived and returned home. In 1944, the Sobolewskis moved to Miłanówek with their adopted daughter and beloved dog, to live with their relatives. One day, a German officer came by the house, which terrified little Inka, but he endedup holding her and giving her a chocolate bar because the blonde child reminded him of his own. Inka grew up with the Sobolewskis until the 1960s. After the war, the family lived very comfortably, thanks to Walerian’s business enterprise. However, after Walerian was arrested for alleged sabotage, and Anastazja suffered fatal heart attack in 1958, someone revealed the truth to Inka about her adoption. This news set her searching for her blood relatives via advertisements and the Israeli embassy. When she discovered a family of cousins by the name of Prusak, Inka left Walerian and continued her life with her relatives. The Baudouin Home provided sanctuary to more refugees than just Inka. During the war, its head, Maria Wierzbowska, took in many Jewish children. As Irena Sendler*, who was responsible for the saving of children in Żegota, later testified, the Baudouin Home was one of a network of homes serving not only as an orphanage, but also as a transition point for children while Aryan papers were being created for them. Once the documents were ready, Wierzbowska would contact one of the neighboring monasteries, letting the nuns know it was time to come and collect the children. One of these monasteries was in Turkowice, next to Lublin, where over 30 children from Baudouin found shelter and thus survived. Sendler wrote: "Upon their arrival at the Baudouin Home the children were often ill, starved, terrified, after horrible experiences. They found in the staff of the Home support and total care: medical, material and parental. For some of them, the Home was a place of temporary yet safe refuge; for some war orphans it became their own home; but to all it was salvation from the death to which the occupants had sentenced them." Among the children taken in by Maria Wierzbowska and her staff were Michał Głowiński, Katarzyna Meloch-Jackl (both of whom were transferred to Turkowice), and Barbara Guz-Schmid, who survived there until the end of thewar. On July 19, 2006, Yad Vashem recognized Tadeusz and Anastazja Sobolewski and Maria Wierzbowska as Righteous Among the Nations.