Cecylia Słapakowa

Cecylia Słapakowa (–) was a Polish-Jewish journalist and translator. She is most known for her work for the Ringelblum Archive, then code-named the "Oyneg Shabbos" project, established by Emanuel Ringelblum.

Her life was dramatically impacted by the invasion of Poland in September 1939, but for approximately six months she was able to continue living in her Warsaw home and to welcome visitors. In early 1940 she was forced to leave her apartment. She ended up living in the Warsaw Ghetto where she chronicled the lives of Jewish women living in the ghetto for the "Oyneg Shabbos" project. She was killed at a concentration camp in either 1942 or 1943.

Early life and background Cecylia Słapakowa and her family came from Lithuania which at the time of her birth was a socially and intellectually semi-detached frontier province of the Russian Empire. She had been born in the Vilnius/Wilna region. At some point she relocated to Warsaw in Poland, which before 1915 was administered as another semi-detached province of the Russian Empire. Despite her Lithuanian provenance she was fluent in both Yiddish and Russian. She was, according to one source, a member of the "old Russian-speaking Jewish intelligensia", which had been dispersed during the turbulent aftermath of the October Revolution in Leningrad. At home her daily language was Russian, but it is clear from what is known of her work that she had mastered a number of different languages. Despite being identified in Warsaw as "Lithuanian", she defied contemporary stereotypes by building and sustaining contacts with Polish and Yiddish cultures. She also undertook work for the Warsaw branch of the Yiddish Research Institute (YIVO / Żydowski Instytut Naukowy). A posthumously published second edition appeared in 1948.

Little is known of Słapakowa's family situation. It is believed that she was married to a successful engineer and that the couple had a daughter. They lived comfortably in a large first floor apartment along the , a long street running not quite east–west across Warsaw's Śródmieście and Wola districts, near the city centre on its western side. Słapakowa was closely networked with fellow members of the Yiddish intellectual elite. Among the better known members of her circle were the eminent historian-critic Shmuel Niger and his younger brother, the poet Daniel Charney. Others in their group included Marc and Bella Chagall.

From what survives, it is known that between December 1941 and May 1942 (possibly later), Słapakowa undertook a study of the lives of Jewish women living in the ghetto during the period.

It is likely that Słapakowa handed over the notebook containing transcriptions of her interviews and other research work to or , two of the "Oyneg Shabbos" project organisers, shortly before the start of the so-called "Great Action", the mass-deportation of Polish Jews undertaken by the German military administrators. Mass-deportations began in the second half of July 1942.

Basia Temkin-Berman At least one of Słapakowa's sixteen interviewees is known to have survived the Holocaust, Barbara "Basia" Temkin (1907–1953). Before 1939 she was one of very few Jews to be employed at the Warsaw Public Library. This meant that she had many friends in Warsaw who were not Jewish, and who would be able to help her after the Germans invaded. As a ghetto inmate, she overcame a succession of difficulties to set up a children's library which, she told Słapakowa during an interview, was far more satisfying than her pre-war work in the city library, because in the library in the Warsaw Ghetto she repeatedly had an instant sense of achievement from the belief that she was helping Jewish children prepare for life after the war. At some point, probably early in 1943, she managed to escape the ghetto after which she and her husband, the future politician Adolf Berman, lived as non-Jews in the "Aryan" part of the city, actively working with members of the Polish resistance to help fellow Jews escape the ghetto, until this activity was abruptly halted in 1944 by the arrival of the Soviet army. Adolf and Besia Temkin-Berman emigrated to Israel in 1950 where Besia died, still aged only 45, in 1953. Through the posthumous publication, in 2000, of her wartime diaries, Basia Temkin-Berman's contributions to Polish resistance have become accessible in her own words.