Podgórski sisters

The Podgórska sisters, Stefania Podgórska (June 2, 1925 – September 29, 2018) and Helena Podgórska (1935 – December 5, 2022), came from a Catholic farming family living near Przemyśl in south-eastern Poland. During the Holocaust, sixteen-year-old Stefania and her seven-year-old sister harboured thirteen Jewish men, women and children in the attic of their home for two-and-a-half years. Both were later honored as the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem as well as by the Jewish and Polish organizations in North America, for their wartime heroism.

Before the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Stefania Podgórska (Born June 2, 1925, in Lipa – Died September 29, 2018, in Los Angeles) worked in a grocery store owned by the Diamants, a Jewish family. Her father had died in 1938 after an illness. Soon after the arrival of the Nazis, her mother and brother were taken to Salzburg for forced labor, while the Diamants were forced into a ghetto. The two Podgórski sisters lived in Przemyśl alone in an apartment rented by Stefania, who was 17 at the time. She got a job in town as a machine-tool operator.

The border between the two invaders ran through the middle of Przemyśl until the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. In 1942, the news spread about the Jewish ghetto in Przemysl being liquidated by the Nazis. Stefania's prewar employer's son, Max Diamant, appeared on their doorstep. He escaped with his brother and cousin from the train to Belzec extermination camp. The girls were terrified, but gave Max permission to hide in the attic. He contacted his family in the ghetto, and asked Stefania to accept them also, including his younger brother Henek and Henek's wife Danuta, Dr. William Shylenger and his daughter Judy, and a friend of his, a dentist with his son. In order to accommodate the fugitives, Stefania soon rented a semi-detached cottage with two rooms, a kitchen, and an attic on Tatarska Street.