The Meaning of Survival
Confronting the Reality of Liberation
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.
All of Stanley's immediate family was killed in the Holocaust.
Among them, his younger sister Helena, brother-in-law Dawid, and niece Nina
Stanley and Diana were living near Kraków, with relatives of Diana, when Soviet troops liberated the city in January, 1945. Still reeling from the loss of their unborn child, Stanley and Diana emerged from the war to confront a tremendous reality of loss. Stanley’s entire immediate family had been killed. His mother, Salomea, was murdered during the Nazi liquidation of the Kielce ghetto. Stanley’s father, Siegfried, was deported from Kielce and most likely was murdered in Treblinka, a death camp. Stanley had found a hiding place near Warsaw for his sister Helena, together with her husband David and baby Nina. In 1944, Helena, David and Nina were betrayed to the Gestapo, arrested, and shot.
