Zofia Baniecka

Zofia Baniecka (12 May 1917 in Warsaw – 1993) was a Polish member of the Resistance during World War II. In addition to relaying guns and other materials to resistance fighters, Baniecka and her mother sheltered over 50 Jews in their home between 1941 and 1944. Later, Baniecka was an activist with the Intervention Bureau of the Polish Workers' Defence Committee in 1977. She and her husband were active participants in the Solidarity movement in the 1980s, distributing underground press. In her professional capacity, Baniecka was a long-time member of the Warsaw chapter of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers (ZPAP).

Life Born fifteen years after her parents' wedding, Zofia Baniecka was the only child of a sculptor father and a teacher mother from Warsaw. Her parents were not religious but she went to a Catholic school. She then studied at the Warsaw University, before the Nazi German and Soviet invasion of Poland. Zofia had many Jewish friends from assimilated homes just like her own intellectually inclined parents. In late 1940 the Nazi occupiers ordered the family to relocate when their home fell within the boundaries of the newly established Warsaw Ghetto.

Even though in 1941 Zofia's father was killed in a Soviet air-strike on Warsaw — from winter of 1941 till August 1944 (when the Warsaw Uprising started) — the two women managed to rescue at least fifty (50) Jews in their home, including a family of ten, escaping the Ghetto firestorm in April 1943 following the failed Ghetto Uprising. When their house was full, the Banieckis helped Jews find other places to hide.