On April 22, 2023, installations symbolically marking the place where civilians hid during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising stood in six locations in Muranów. In this way, the POLIN Museum, together with the SENNA collective, wants to restore the memory of these places to urban reality. By doing so, we are also reminding the civilians - the most numerous group participating in the 1943 uprising. We have selected 6 figures who are at the same time heroes and heroines of the temporary exhibition "Around us a sea of fire".

“I stepped out of the bunker and I didn’t know where to go”[1.1], recalled Stefania Milenbach. Her experiences during the Uprising are reminiscent of Odysseus’ wanderings—never ending search for a shelter for mere few hours, for a day. Stefania fled from one burning bunker to another, she lay under a sheet of metal or sat huddled in a cupboard at an abandoned flat to wait out another “action.”

She had no support—her parents and younger sister were deported to the death camp in Treblinka during the Great Action in 1942. In the first days of the Uprising her husband, medical doctor Salomon Świeca, was taken from an ER unit and deported to Majdanek where he took his own life by swallowing poison. Stefania learnt about that only after the war had ended; back then, in April 1943, she kept waiting for him at an arranged hideout. They were a young couple, having met in the ghetto, at the Jewish Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Czyste where Stefania, a biology graduate, worked as a lab technician.

Towards the end of the Uprising, Stefa joined a group of strangers—survivors from the raging fire in search of a hideout, just like her. From now on, they hid together in shelters and bunkers at 9 and 11 Wołyńska St. They spent long months under the rubble of the destroyed ghetto; they fought hunger, thirst, illnesses and death. In November 1943, Stefania gave birth to a baby boy in a bunker. The baby died of hunger a few days later.

Life in the ruins of the ghetto continued until December 1943, when the entire group jumped through the ghetto wall to the “Aryan” side. Stefa together with Hanele, a companion from the bunker, hid in a number of Polish households. They received help from Michalina Poncyliusz who ran a grocery store where the two women popped in by chance after leaving the ghetto. They saw the liberation in Milanówek where they had fled after the Warsaw Uprising.

After the war, Stefania settled in Łódź together with her pre-war friends. She started studying film direction at the Film School. In 1950, she left for Israel where she returned to her pre-war profession as a lab technician. She met her future husband, Mordka Milenbach, and they soon moved to Brazil. They settled in São Paulo where their daughter Anette was born.

REFERENCES:

• Documents made available by Anette Wajnsztajn, daughter of S. Fidelseid.
• Fidelseid S., Pozostałam w gruzach... (moje przeżycia po likwidacji getta warszawskiego – kwiecień-grudzień 1943), Nasze Słowo, 1947, nr 19 (3); 1948, nr 1 (32), 2 (33), 3 (34), 4 (35).
• Stella Fidelseid's Diary, AŻIH, sygn. 302/180.
• Interview with Stefania Milenbach dated 30.04.1997 r.USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, [online] https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/28551?from=search [access: 29.03.2023]. 

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