Wanda Zofia Ciecierska papers

Wanda Zofia Ciecierska (1921-1991) was born Wanda Zofia Weber on April 13, 1921 in Warsaw, Poland to Roman Catholic couple Karol Weber and Teodozia Kulesza. She studied at the Zofia Kurmanowa school and Warsaw Nursing School during the Nazi occupation while also working at the Polish Red Cross Hospital. During the Warsaw Uprising, she continued to work at the Red Cross Hospital as well as for the Polish Home Army. After the Germans burned down the hospital, she was transported with other hospital personnel to hospitals in Wola and Milanówek. She fled Warsaw to join relatives in Skierniewice and then Krakow, but she was arrested in January 1945. She was held at Prądnik Biały for two weeks, transferred to a transit camp in Dresden, and then performed forced labor at the Petzold factory in Grunhain until liberation by the American Army. After the war she worked in an American Army unit kitchen and then as a nurse at the UNRRA hospital in Ganacker and the IRO hospital in Regensburg. She fought to be recognized as a displaced person. She married Stanislaw Ciecierski on August 12, 1946 at the Ganacker displaced persons camp.

Stanislaw Ciecierski (1921-1986) was born October 21, 1921 in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. His Polish father, Wacław Ciecierski, and Russian mother, Olga Kudrjawzew, were Catholic, and he had at least one brother, Włodzimierz, born January 18, 1916. He grew up in Poznań, which became the capital of Reichsgau Wartheland during World War II. He was exempt from hard labor during the war due to a heart condition, and he worked for the Grundstücksgesellschaft für den Reichsgau Wartheland, a real estate company involved in the expropriation of Polish assets. His father was arrested in 1943 and sent to Pawiak prison and then to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he is believed to have perished. Stanislaw moved to Ronneburg near the end of the war and was recognized as a stateless displaced person after the war. He married Wanda Zofia Weber in 1946, and the couple moved to Straubing. They immigrated to the United States with the help of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, sailing from Bremerhaven to New York in August 1949 aboard the USAT General Ballou.