Marta Olchawa – A Girl Rescued From The Lviv Ghetto Museum of the history of Polish Jews

The collection contains archival and museum materials related to the life of Marta Olchawa (née Bauer, 1938–2021), a girl rescued from the Holocaust.
It consists mainly of photographs, personal and official documents, as well as private correspondence. It also contains objects belonging to her parents - a violin with its case and two bows which had belonged to her father, Izydor Marek Bauer, and jewellery, kept in a linen pouch, which had belonged to her mother, Ernestyna (née Kutin).
It may be assumed that most of these items were not so much keepsakes as material safeguards. Should they be sold, they could have provided the child with means of subsistence (or to remain hidden).
Following Olchawa’s death, these artefacts were donated to the museum by her friend, Elżbieta Chmielewska (who also recorded an oral history account about her friend, her wartime fate during the Holocaust, and her postwar life).
A great deal is known about her parents. Bauer held a doctorate in law (he studied law in Vienna), though he never practised and, instead, devoted his professional life to music. He trained at, among other places, the Conservatory of the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, as a pupil of Otakar Ševčík in the Master School.
From 1920, he was a professor at the Anna Niementowska Music Institute in Lwów (of which he was also a graduate) and, subsequently, at the Karol Szymanowski Conservatory of Music. From 1936, he also studied at the Conservatory of the Polish Music Society. He played first violin in a string quartet (with H. Berger, E. W. Silberstein, and K. Lilienthal).
In 1941, following the German occupation of Lwów, a ghetto was established in the city, to which the Bauer family was sent. Marek and Ernestyna Bauer managed to extract Marta from the ghetto. They entrusted her to Stanisława Olchawa (1901-1963), an accountant, who had come to Lwów before the war. She found employment at the Osram lightbulb factory, where she met Engineer Hübner, a cousin of Ernestyna (née Kutin).
It is not known how the transfer from the ghetto occurred. Marta’s parents remained in the ghetto and, most likely, perished there. They may have died of typhus, as little Marta was suffering from that illness when she left the ghetto.
The collection contains a forged birth and baptismal certificate for Marta, who was given the additional name “Józefa” and the new surname of her foster mother – “Olchawa”. The document shows Henryka Malarska as the child’s godmother. Both women had known each other through the Sodality of Our Lady organisation, to which they had belonged before the war.
The baptismal certificate does not include the name of a new father. However, his name appears in later documents in which Stanisława Olchawa affirmed that Kazimierz Olchawa was her husband and Marta’s father. According to Elżbieta Chmielewska, however, Stanisława Olchawa was never married, and the information about the marriage was not true.
Marta Olchawa did not remember the moment she left the ghetto, but she remembered a scene from a pantry, which had served as her hiding place. She had been told to sit quietly. So, she ate cream from a small pot. She only learned of her Jewish origin at the age of eleven or twelve from her two biological aunts, who later emigrated to Israel.
After the war, Stanisława and Marta Olchawa, with Henryka Malarska, left Lwów for the west while the war, there, was still ongoing. Malarska, who had worked in a canteen for German officers in Lwów, spoke fluent German - her father was Austrian, and she had attended a finishing school in Vienna. The Germans offered her the opportunity to flee from the advancing Soviet forces, and the three women took advantage of it - Malarska, Olchawa, and the girl concealing her Jewish identity -.
They first lived in Nysa, then in Opole and, from 1952, in Zielonka near Warsaw. The women were assisted by uncle Hübner, Marta Olchawa’s only surviving relative in Poland. He had lost his first wife in the Lwów ghetto. Following the outbreak of the German–Soviet war, he found himself in the USSR, due to the Lwów lightbulb factory, where he worked, had been evacuated deeper into Soviet territory. After the war, he located Marta and helped Stanisława Olchawa find employment.
In Zielonka. they were assigned a staff apartment - a room with a kitchen. Stanisława Olchawa was a devout Catholic. With her uncle’s consent, she had the girl baptised.
Marta Olchawa became a doctor, specialising in internal medicine, although she had dreamed of studying at a technical university. For more than ten years, she worked at the District Health Clinic in Radzymin. After obtaining her first-level specialisation in internal medicine, she continued her career at the District Health Clinic in Tłuszcz.
She got to know her father’s side of the family, who were living in France. Her father’s brother, Artur Bauer, had emigrated, to Palestine, before the war with his wife, Regina (née Sold). They had two children - a son, Arie, who later moved to France (where he lived under the surname Bar-Or), and a daughter, Rut. Their long-term contact with their cousin is documented in letters and photographs preserved in the collection.
Marta Olchawa did not establish a family of her own.
Prepared by Marta Frączkiewicz and Monika Harchut.