Irena Adamowicz

Traces the life of Adamowicz (1911-72), a Polish Catholic and an active Scout, who became active in the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair in the 1930s and rescued Jews during the Shoah. Pp. 49-120 deal with the Holocaust period. Adamowicz helped Jews who had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto find a hiding place on the "Aryan side", and jeopardized her life serving as a liaison between ghettos. After the German invasion of the USSR, Adamowicz travelled to the ghettos in Vilnius, Kaunas, Šiauliai, and Białystok. Upon her return to Warsaw, she made contact with the Jewish Military Organization and established ties between it and the Polish resistance, of which she was a member. During the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring 1943, she maintained a first-aid post together with other female leaders of the illegal Polish Scout movement. In antisemitic postwar Poland, Adamowicz was persecuted for her role in helping the Jews. She was recognized as a Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1988. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)