Sztefec Jadwiga

Sztefec, Jadwiga (Subikina) Alexander Semyanovski was born in 1937 in Vetrino, Belarus. By the beginning of World War II, the family had moved to Łuck (today Lutsk). Alexander’s father, Mikhail, was a military officer who fell in the first days of the war. His mother, Sofia Alkevitch-Semyanovska, and the two children, Alexander and Felix, were sent to the Łuck Ghetto in September 1941. They stayed there until August 1942, when a mass shooting in which 25,000 Jews were murdered took place. Right before the Aktion (mass execution) began, Alexander and Felix were taken away by Jadwiga Sztefec. She had been friends with Sofia before the war (Sofia worked at the post office and had many local friends and acquaintances). Jadwiga risked her life providing the Semyanovskis with food and clothing throughout their stay in the ghetto, but when an acquaintance of hers in the police told her there was to be a mass killing, she decided to bribe a guard in the ghetto to extract the boys and save them. The spontaneous decision to save the children had dire consequences for Jadwiga. Her Ukrainian husband left her because it was well known that the Nazis would kill their entire family if they were to find Jewish children in their home. Her acquaintances knew she had no children, so she had to keep the boys hidden in the attic. Given her circumstances, she soon realized it was impossible to rescue two children, so she arranged for a different hideout for Felix, who survived the war tending to cattle on a farm. Jadwiga was able to get Alexander an identification card through her church, registering him as an adopted orphan. Still, when it was too dangerous to stay in the house, she had to hide him in the chimney or take him to the countryside, taking odd jobs to justify moving about. When someone reported that Jadwiga Sztefec was hiding a Jewish child, the two were saved by the same police acquaintance who had told her about the Aktion at the beginning of the war. Theymanaged to escape again. After the war, Alexander stayed with Jadwiga until his enrollment in a military academy in 1955. He considered her his mother and treated her accordingly throughout her life. She died in 1977. On April 17, 2012, Yad Vashem recognized Jadwiga Sztefec as "Righteous Among the Nations".