Stanislava Roztropowicz papers

Stanislawa (Stanka) Roztropowicz (b. 1927) was born in Radziwillow, Poland (Radyvýliv, Ukraine) to Catholic parents, Jozéf (b. 1892) and Natalia (b. 1894) Roztropowicz. Stanka had two sisters, Zosia and Janina (Janka, b. 1925) and a brother, Andrzej (b. 1930). Radziwillow was occupied by the Russians in 1939 under the terms of the German-Soviet Pact. In 1941, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union and occupied the territory. Later the same year, a friend of Stanislawa’s told her that she found a Jewish infant living alone in a wooden crib with no clothes and no food in a dark cellar. Stanka’s parents decided to take in the abandoned child and raise her as if she were their own. The little girl was very ill from malnutrition and exposure and not used to people. The family worked together to nurse her back to health, though she would continue to get sick easily. The Rostropowicz's named the little girl Irena, and called her Inka. The family told people that she was the child of a cousin who had been murdered. That fall, their house was burned forcing them to relocate and Zosia was conscripted into forced labor in Germany. The family also had to board German soldiers in their small home. In the spring of 1944, the town was at the center of the battlefront as the Soviets advanced from the East. After a bombing raid, the family was ordered to evacuate to the next town. After the war ended, the family was repatriated and told to move from newly Soviet controlled Dubno to Polish governed Ostrowie. Inka started first grade at a Polish school and in July 1945 she was baptized a Catholic in Saint Wojciech's Church.

In October 1948, the family was contacted by the Coordinating Committee for Jewish Children, based in Łódź, Poland. The committee’s mission was to discover and reclaim Jewish children raised by Christian families during the Holocaust. The Roztropowicz’s had made it known to some aid groups that Inka was Jewish, in the hopes that they might discover surviving family members. Living conditions were extremely difficult postwar and the family agreed to give Inka to the Committee, thinking it offered her the best chance for the future, and Inka was placed in an orphanage. Inka was adopted in 1949 by Dr. Sonia and Zigmund Goszczewski, who then immigrated to Israel. The Roztropowicz’s continued to write the Committee for news of Inka as they had been promised updates on her well-being, but after 1950, they received no more information. It was not until 1999 that Inka, now Sabina Heller, discovered that she was adopted and reconnected with Stanislava and the Roztropowicz family. In 2000 Yad Vashem recognized the members of the Roztropowicz family as Righteous Among the Nations.