On August 1, 1944, Warsaw rose against Nazi occupation. Among the tens of thousands who answered the call to fight were two Jewish sisters who had already survived the Warsaw Ghetto under assumed Catholic identities. One was fifteen years old. The other was nine.

For more than eighty years, their wartime story survived.

Readers of Joseph Ziemian’s The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square, the definitive account of the Jewish children who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and survived on Warsaw’s Aryan side, have long known the sisters only by their wartime identities: Marysia and Stefcia. In one of the book’s best-known photographs, a small girl wearing the beret of the Polish Home Army is identified simply as “Stefcia.” In a Warsaw memorial archive, she appears only as “Unknown Stefcia.”

Yet the documentary record tells a different story.

The two sisters were Miriam Szurek, later Miriam Dranger, and Edna Szurek, later Edna Brill.

Edna is my mother-in-law. I found this documentary trail while researching her memoir, and what began as a search for background detail became a discovery in its own right.

Their identities can be traced through surviving Polish Home Army identification cards, German prisoner-of-war records, postwar verification files, family papers, wartime photographs, and a remarkable presentation copy of Ziemian’s Hebrew memoir, personally inscribed by Yad Vashem to Miriam in 1963.

The records were never lost.

They simply remained disconnected from one another.

Born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Miriam in 1929 and Edna in 1934 were children when Germany invaded Poland. They were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, where starvation, disease, and deportation became part of everyday life.

As the Nazi campaign to destroy the ghetto intensified, their older brother Yakov made a decision that would save his sisters’ lives.

He obtained the baptismal identities of two Polish Catholic sisters who had died years earlier.

Miriam became Krystyna-Marja Skółkowska.

Edna became Stefania Skółkowska.

The names were far more than false papers.

They became the girls’ new existence.

Every conversation, every church service, every encounter with a German patrol or suspicious neighbor demanded absolute conviction. One hesitation, one forgotten prayer, one slip of the tongue could expose them as Jewish.

Within the Polish underground they assumed still another identity.

Miriam became Marysia.

Nine-year-old Edna became Kajtek.

These overlapping identities reflected the reality of occupied Warsaw. Their Catholic names concealed their Jewish birth. Their Home........

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