Stanislawa Leszczynska was born on May 8th, 1896, in the Bałuty neighborhood of Lodz, Poland.
She was the oldest of three children of Jan Zambrzycki and his wife Henryka. She completed high school in 1914 and 2 years later she married printer Bronisław Leszczynski.
In 1920, Stanislawa and Bronislaw with their two children Bronisław and Sylwia, moved to Warsaw where she enrolled in the midwife college and completed her studies.
In 1922, they moved back to Lodz where she got a job as a midwife. There , she gave birth to her second son Stanisław and in 1923 her third son, Henryk was born.
Stanislawa loved her job and was on call day and night, assisting women who delivered their newborns at home, since this had been a usual practice in the past. She worked in the poorest districts of Lodz and often walked miles to each delivery.
When World War II began, Stanislawa and her husband involved in the Polish resistance movement but eventually, the entire family was caught by the Gestapo in 1943.
Her husband was killed in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, her sons were sent to labor camps in Germany while she and her daughter to Auschwitz, where she spent two years in a non-Jewish sector of the camp.
Stanislawa proclaimed herself as midwife to the camp’s authorities and was relegated to women’s camp maternity ward.
All the newborns of the prisoners in the camp were killed before she arrived in April, 1943.
During her time in Auschwitz, Stanislawa delivered over 3,000 babies. Half of them were murdered and another thousand died due to the horrific conditions in the camp. But after 1943, about 500 babies with blonde hair and blue eyes were sent to be raised as Germans, while 30 more survived the camp.
Somehow, she managed to tattoo the children who were about to be adopted by German families hoping that one day they will be reunited with their mothers.
All the 3,000 babies delivered by Stanislawa were born alive, not one single baby was lost during birth. She was called “Mother” by the prisoners.
When World War II was over, Stanislawa returned to her job in Lodz. All of her children survived the forced labor camps. Stanislawa rarely spoke publicly about her time spent in Auschwitz and never had considered her deeds as heroic or unusual.
She attended an official celebration in 1970 where she met a small group of the surviving babies who had been born in the camp.
Her story is one of the most miraculous accounts from the Holocaust’s history and Stanislawa Leszczynska is being considered for canonization. God bless that woman.