On August 1, 1944, Warsaw rose against Nazi occupation. Among the tens of thousands who answered the call to fight were two Jewish sisters who had already survived the Warsaw Ghetto under assumed Catholic identities. One was fifteen years old. The other was nine.\n<\/p>\n
For more than eighty years, their wartime story survived.\n<\/p>\n
Their names did not.\n<\/p>\n
Readers of Joseph Ziemian\u2019s The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square, the definitive account of the Jewish children who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and survived on Warsaw\u2019s Aryan side, have long known the sisters only by their wartime identities: Marysia and Stefcia. In one of the book\u2019s best-known photographs, a small girl wearing the beret of the Polish Home Army is identified simply as \u201cStefcia.\u201d In a Warsaw memorial archive, she appears only as \u201cUnknown Stefcia.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Yet the documentary record tells a different story.\n<\/p>\n
The two sisters were Miriam Szurek, later Miriam Dranger, and Edna Szurek, later Edna Brill.\n<\/p>\n
Edna is my mother-in-law. I found this documentary trail while researching her memoir, and what began as a search for background detail became a discovery in its own right.\n<\/p>\n
Their identities can be traced through surviving Polish Home Army identification cards, German prisoner-of-war records, postwar verification files, family papers, wartime photographs, and a remarkable presentation copy of Ziemian\u2019s Hebrew memoir, personally inscribed by Yad Vashem to Miriam in 1963.\n<\/p>\n
The records were never lost.\n<\/p>\n
They simply remained disconnected from one another.\n<\/p>\n
Born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Miriam in 1929 and Edna in 1934 were children when Germany invaded Poland. They were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, where starvation, disease, and deportation became part of everyday life.\n<\/p>\n
As the Nazi campaign to destroy the ghetto intensified, their older brother Yakov made a decision that would save his sisters\u2019 lives.\n<\/p>\n
He obtained the baptismal identities of two Polish Catholic sisters who had died years earlier.\n<\/p>\n
Miriam became Krystyna-Marja Sk\u00f3\u0142kowska.\n<\/p>\n
Edna became Stefania Sk\u00f3\u0142kowska.\n<\/p>\n
The names were far more than false papers.\n<\/p>\n
They became the girls\u2019 new existence.\n<\/p>\n
Every conversation, every church service, every encounter with a German patrol or suspicious neighbor demanded absolute conviction. One hesitation, one forgotten prayer, one slip of the tongue could expose them as Jewish.\n<\/p>\n
Within the Polish underground they assumed still another identity.\n<\/p>\n
Miriam became Marysia.\n<\/p>\n
Nine-year-old Edna became Kajtek.\n<\/p>\n
These overlapping identities reflected the reality of occupied Warsaw. Their Catholic names concealed their Jewish birth. Their Home Army pseudonyms protected resistance fighters from capture if documents fell into German hands.\n<\/p>\n
Those borrowed names kept the sisters alive.\n<\/p>\n
After escaping the ghetto, they survived on Warsaw\u2019s Aryan side among the children immortalized in Ziemian\u2019s memoir. Like many of the papierosiarze, the Jewish children who struggled to survive around Three Crosses Square, the sisters lived by their wits, moving constantly through a city where discovery meant execution.\n<\/p>\n
When the Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, 1944, both joined the Armia Krajowa.\n<\/p>\n
Fifteen-year-old Miriam served in the transportation and courier service, carrying messages and supplies through streets under constant German fire while armed with a pistol.\n<\/p>\n
Nine-year-old Edna carried dispatches and a firearm through ruined neighborhoods where a child could sometimes move more freely than an adult.\n<\/p>\n
She remained in combat throughout the sixty-three-day uprising.\n<\/p>\n
During the fighting she was wounded by a grenade.\n<\/p>\n
On October 2, 1944, the day the uprising surrendered and her tenth birthday, she received the Cross of Valor and a second decoration for wounds received in combat. Based on the documentary evidence currently available, Edna appears to have been the youngest decorated soldier in the history of the Polish Home Army.\n<\/p>\n
After the capitulation, the sisters entered German captivity.\n<\/p>\n
They were transported through Stalag X-B Sandbostel before arriving at Oberlangen, the prisoner-of-war camp that held captured women soldiers of the Armia Krajowa.\n<\/p>\n
Against extraordinary odds, both survived.\n<\/p>\n
None of these facts is especially difficult to document.\n<\/p>\n
The mystery begins afterward.\n<\/p>\n
Joseph Ziemian\u2019s The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square has long been recognized as the definitive account of the Jewish children who survived on Warsaw\u2019s Aryan side before joining the Polish resistance. The Hochman brothers, Peretz and Zalman, became the best-known members of that remarkable group. Their names appear in museums, memorials, and historical scholarship.\n<\/p>\n
Less well known is that Ziemian also preserved the story of the Szurek sisters.\n<\/p>\n
He simply preserved it under the names that had once kept them alive.\n<\/p>\n
For decades, readers looked at the little girl in the beret without realizing they were looking at nine-year-old Edna Szurek.\n<\/p>\n
They read about Marysia and Stefcia without knowing the sisters were Miriam and Edna Szurek, Jewish children who had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, survived by living as Catholic girls, fought in the Warsaw Uprising, and endured German prisoner-of-war camps.\n<\/p>\n
How could such a carefully documented story survive while the identities of its central figures remained hidden?\n<\/p>\n
The answer begins with Joseph Ziemian himself.\n<\/p>\n
The Szurek sisters were not anonymous children who drifted into his memoir by chance. Their older brother, Yakov Szurek, appears in The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square under his own name, \u201cShurek Jacob.\u201d Years later, in testimony preserved by my family, Yakov recalled reading the newly published book and discovering himself in its pages. Unable to sleep that night, he traveled to Holon to visit Joseph Ziemian, whom he described as a friend, and asked that his own name be removed from future editions.\n<\/p>\n
Whether Ziemian honored that request is almost beside the point.\n<\/p>\n
What matters is that he knew the family personally.\n<\/p>\n
The girls he wrote about as Marysia and Stefcia were never strangers to him. They were sisters whose identities had already been transformed by war.\n<\/p>\n
Another surviving document points in the same direction.\n<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/TOI_open_book_crop-640x400.jpg\")
The dedication page from the 1963 Hebrew edition of Joseph Ziemian\u2019s The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square, personally inscribed by Yad Vashem to Miriam Dranger (n\u00e9e Szurek). The inscription honors her as one of the children whose life became \u201ca building stone\u201d of the book. Courtesy of the Brill family.\n<\/p>\n
In February 1963, Yad Vashem published the first Hebrew edition of The Cigarette Sellers of Three Crosses Square. One copy was presented to Miriam Dranger, n\u00e9e Szurek. The dedication praised her as one of the children \u201cwhose chapter of life was a building stone in this book,\u201d honoring her courage and gevurah, heroism.\n<\/p>\n
It is a remarkable document.\n<\/p>\n
It demonstrates that Yad Vashem knew exactly who Miriam was. Yet over the decades, the public story remained attached to wartime aliases rather than to the sisters\u2019 real names.\n<\/p>\n
The evidence connecting those identities has existed for years.\n<\/p>\n
Polish Home Army identification cards, German prisoner-of-war transport records, postwar verification files, photographs, and family papers all survived.\n<\/p>\n
The pieces were scattered across archives in Poland, Israel, Germany, Britain, and the United States, preserved under different names, different languages, and different circumstances.\n<\/p>\n
Only when viewed together do they tell one continuous story.\n<\/p>\n
While researching Little Edna\u2019s War, the memoir of my mother-in-law, Edna Brill, I was searching for details that would enrich the narrative of one remarkable survivor. Instead, I found something unexpected among her preserved papers.\n<\/p>\n
A newspaper clipping she had quietly kept for decades.\n<\/p>\n
The article reproduced a familiar photograph of a young girl wearing an Armia Krajowa beret.\n<\/p>\n
This time, however, the caption identified the figures as \u201cthe Hochman brothers, Pawe\u0142 and Zenek, and Stefcia.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Within the article itself, another sentence stood out:\n<\/p>\n
\u201cMarysia and Stefcia-Kajtek served bravely in the courier service.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
For the first time, the photograph, Edna\u2019s wartime cover name, and her Home Army nom de guerre appeared together in a contemporary source.\n<\/p>\n
That clipping became one more link in a documentary chain stretching from occupied Warsaw to postwar Europe, Israel, and America.\n<\/p>\n
Together with the surviving Home Army records, German prisoner-of-war documents, the Yad Vashem presentation copy, and family testimony, the identities of the two sisters emerged with unusual clarity.\n<\/p>\n
Not a new history.\n<\/p>\n
A more complete one.\n<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, I shared this documentation with Fundacja \u017bycie \u017bydowskie, whose Papierosiarze project preserves the stories of the Jewish children who survived on Warsaw\u2019s Aryan side. Rather than questioning the evidence, the Foundation welcomed the material and asked that I prepare concise biographies of Miriam and Edna in the format used for the other children in the project.\n<\/p>\n
That response reflects an important truth.\n<\/p>\n
History is never entirely finished.\n<\/p>\n
Archives are not static collections. They continue to grow as new evidence is connected to existing records and forgotten lives become more fully understood.\n<\/p>\n
The story of Miriam and Edna Szurek illustrates that process.\n<\/p>\n
The false Catholic identities their brother created saved two Jewish girls from almost certain death. Those same identities also followed them into the historical record, separating their wartime service from the names with which they had been born.\n<\/p>\n
The irony is profound.\n<\/p>\n
The names that protected them from the Nazis also helped obscure them from history.\n<\/p>\n
Today, the Hochman brothers are rightly remembered by name. Their courage deserves that recognition.\n<\/p>\n
So do the courage and sacrifice of Miriam and Edna Szurek.\n<\/p>\n
On this eighty-second anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, their story reminds us that history is not only about discovering new documents. Sometimes it is about recognizing that documents preserved for decades have always belonged together.\n<\/p>\n
For more than eighty years, the historical record remembered two courageous Jewish girls as Marysia and Stefcia.\n<\/p>\n
They deserve to be remembered as they were born.\n<\/p>\n
Miriam Szurek.\n<\/p>\n
Edna Szurek.\n<\/p>\n
\u2013\n<\/p>\n
Janet Bond Brill, PhD, researches and writes about the hidden histories of Holocaust survivors. She is the author of Little Edna\u2019s War, based on her mother-in-law\u2019s Holocaust testimony, published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.\u00a0Order Now<\/a>.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On August 1, 1944, Warsaw rose against Nazi occupation. Among the tens of thousands who answered the call…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[95],"tags":[63352,42309,182,35924,181],"class_list":["post-137908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-warsaw","tag-holocaust-denial","tag-holocaust-revisionism","tag-poland","tag-the-holocaust","tag-warsaw"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/117010653969860106","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}