Maria Kotarba

Maria Kotarba (4 September 1907 — 30 December 1956) was a courier in the Polish resistance movement, smuggling clandestine messages and supplies among the local partisan groups. She was arrested, tortured and interrogated by the Gestapo as a political prisoner before being imprisoned in Tarnów and then deported to Auschwitz on 6 January 1943. Maria Kotarba was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem on 18 September 2005 for risking her life to save the lives of Jewish prisoners in two Nazi concentration camps. By the summer of 1943, the resistance movement in the camp became organised and brought Kotarba into their ranks. Her reputation as a skilled courier traveled with her from Tarnów. Maria was involved in smuggling food, medicine and messages from the outside resistance groups into the camp. As a courier, Kotarba delivered medicine for the prisoner-doctors and brought in other supplies, which they shared. She used her resistance contacts to have Lena Mankowska allocated to lighter duties when she fell sick, and cooked soup for her on a small stove in her block. In February 1945, the SS again moved the prisoners to the Neustadt-Glewe sub-camp, where the Red Army liberated the women in May 1945. After liberation, the two friends parted. Maria Kotarba returned to her home in Poland, remained single and died in 1956, aged 49, never having returned to the health she enjoyed before the war. She was buried in Owczary.

Lena Mankowska married Wladyslaw Łakomy and settled in Great Britain. In 1997, Lena Lakomy made an unsuccessful attempt to get Maria, her "Angel of Auschwitz", recognised as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Eight years later James Foucar successfully resubmitted her testimony, which was approved by Yad Vashem on 8 December 2005 based on Kotarba's qualifications for inclusion. Lena Lakomy was posthumously recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust.