A Wedding in Wartime
Stanley Steyer and Diana Kintzel
This digital exhibition is the story of two individuals: Stanley Steyer and Diana Kintzel. Stanley was a young Jewish man in Poland who survived the Holocaust through ingenuity, luck, and the kindness of others. Diana was a young Polish Catholic woman who fell in love with Stanley, and supported him in his efforts to hide Jews in flight.
Broadly speaking, this exhibition also tells the story of Jewish life in Poland, a land that underwent dramatic changes over the course of the twentieth century. Stanley was born in a Poland that chafed under foreign rule, divided between the German, Austrian, and Russian empires. By the time Diana was born, following World War I, Poland had finally achieved its long-awaited independence. It promised equal rights to all its minorities.
Stanley and Diana were married on September 21, 1943
They both used false identities.
Stanley and Diana found living quarters with Diana’s cousins, Jan and Regina Kwasowski, and their daughter Barbara.
Stanley began to learn more about Diana’s nuclear family. Diana had grown up mainly in the town of Zamość, southeast of Warsaw. Her father, Józef, was an opera singer and stage director, and her mother, Władysława, was a classically-trained pianist. Diana herself dreamed of being an opera singer before the war; in addition to studying voice, she played piano, guitar, and organ. Music gave Diana great joy – this was an individual who strove for higher beauty.
When the war broke out, Diana took a job as a typist in Zamość. When Stanley met her in Warsaw, she was studying cosmetology. Diana and her brother Tadeusz soon began to take on jobs that would have been risky for Stanley: finding apartments for the Jews he was hiding, or bringing them sustenance. The selfless choices that Diana made during the war helped to save the lives of others – but as we’ll see, they also had a tremendous impact on her own life in the years moving forward.
