Licińska Paulina (Stęborowska)

Licińska, Paulina The Menkes family—Ida (b. 1882) and her children Zofia (b. 1902), Ludwika (b. 1914), and Baruch-Bolesław (b. 1904), lived in Łódź, Poland, until they moved to Warsaw in 1940. Bolesław Menkes had married a Polish woman several years prior and had converted to Catholicism. It was on his initiative that the Menkes family moved to Warsaw, as he feared for his mother and two sisters. At the end of 1940, fearing denouncement, they moved again, this time to nearby Piastów. They settled in a villa belonging to Paulina Licińska, who was aware that they were Jews. Paulina was a wealthy woman who owned many properties in Warsaw and its environs. Despite her knowledge of their origins, she took them in and tied her fate to theirs. Paulina managed to procure Christian identity papers for Ida and her daughters under the name Salaciński, pretending they were her relatives from Wilno (today Vilnius). The Menkes sisters, Zofia and Ludwika, were relatively unafraid, given their natural blonde hair and blue eyes, but Ida looked less like the surrounding population and spoke broken Polish, so Paulina made her stay inside without ever leaving the apartment. In 1941 Bolesław and his wife had a baby daughter named Alexandra, and she too was hidden in Paulina’s house. The Menkeses stayed with Paulina throughout the war. Immediately after the liberation, they presented themselves before the Central Committee of Polish Jews, stating their real names and explaining that they had been saved by Paulina Licińska, who had provided Christian identity papers for them and had put them up in her house. Ida passed away in January 1945, but the rest of the family returned to Łódź. On August 7, 2012, Yad Vashem recognized Paulina Licińska as Righteous Among the Nations.