Steyer Family Collection

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Danuta (Diana) Kintzel, Warsaw, ca. 1943

In 1943, when this photograph was taken, Danuta Kintzel was twenty-two years old. It was wartime, and she had recently moved to the Polish capital of Warsaw. A majority of the city’s Jewish population had already been killed, deported from the Warsaw ghetto to the death camp of Treblinka. The Jewish underground was secretly preparing an uprising. These were the circumstances in which Diana met a young, Jewish man named Stanley Steyer, and fell in love with him. Stanley was living outside the ghetto under a false identity. He had organized a business whose profits enabled him to support the Jewish underground in the ghetto. Diana was a Polish Catholic, and by entering into a relationship with Stanley, she was taking a huge risk: if discovered, she could have been killed. Nevertheless, Diana joined Stanley in his clandestine activities, assisting him as he placed his friends and family in hiding. She has yet to be recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.