![]() They had fled the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jewish population had been segregated in the fall of 1940. He had known Kazimierz Kaufman Szapiro (1888 – 1977) and his Swedish wife, Ela Mandelsztam Szapiro (1887 – 1957), both dentists, and their sons, Marek (1917 -2002) a neurosurgeon and Jerzy (1920 -2011), a medical student, before the war and felt he was obligated to provide assistance. In the fall of 1942, Stefan decided to hide a Jewish family, the Szapiros, even though there were severe penalties, including death, for anyone caught hiding Jews. The access point was hidden in a cabinet in the laundry room. Stefan, uncertain of what might occur, built a hiding place in the cellar of his home. The occupation government sought to brutally subjugate the Polish people, and used propaganda to denounce Polish people as filthy, bestial, and subhuman. By October, Warsaw was controlled by German forces. On September 17, the Soviet Army invaded from the east, and the two occupiers partitioned the country as agreed upon in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed a month earlier. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and much of the country was under aerial bombardment for weeks. Stefan was Greek Catholic and his wife was Roman Catholic. Stefan was an engineer and lived in Wawer, now a suburb of Warsaw, with his wife Janina nee Niewiarowska (1898 - ?), their son Marian (1929-?), and some of Janina’s family members.
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