Leokadia Schmidt (1914–1984)

Leokadia Schmidt, née Knobelman, was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw. She attended secondary school and had some secretarial training. In 1937, she married Jósef Bergman Schmidt. She and her husband set up and ran a workshop specializing in the manufacture of luxury women's footwear. They were living a comfortable middle-class life when Nazi Germany invaded the country in World War II. When the Nazis began deporting Jews in 1942, Leokadia hid with her five-month-old baby son Kazimierz in a shuttered lace factory until caught in a roundup. They were marched to a depot for deportation to the death camp at Treblinka, but escaped and hid in a nearby children's hospital. Her husband was accepted back to work and Leokadia went on to hide in an apartment on Mila Street. She smuggled her baby out of the ghetto with a Polish worker and then left herself, followed by her husband a few days later. Using false identities, they hid on the "Aryan" side of Warsaw. Staying in a small loft behind a tinsmith shop, she wrote an account of the destruction of the ghetto while her husband directed a clandestine shoe and slipper factory that sold its products on the black market. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, Jósef stayed to fight for a while while Leokadia fled. She wound up at a transit camp in Opoczno, assigned to agricultural labor. Eventually the Schmidts were reunited and fled again to Milanówek, where they were arrested by the Gestapo and handed over to the Polish police for execution. Leokadia was pregnant again at the time. The date was January 15, 1945 -- and that day, the town was taken over by the Russian Army. The Schmidts were freed. She gave birth to her second son, Marian, in April 1945 and retrieved Kazimierz from the orphanage where he was hidden. Jósef returned to the ruins of Warsaw to retrieve his wife's memoirs from where they had been buried for safekeeping. The family emigrated first to Paris, then to Caracas, Venezuela. Leokadia and Jósef later moved to the USA, where their sons were studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and settled in Phoenix, Arizona. Her memoir, originally published in Polish in 1973, was published in English in 2019 as Rescued From the Ashes: The Diary of Leokadia Schmidt, Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.