Polish Catholic midwife Stanisława Leszczyńska delivered 3,000 babies at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust in occupied Poland. She also smuggled false documents and food to Jews inside the ghetto as part of a growing Polish resistance.
Leszczyńska’s legacy lived on long after the liberation of Auschwitz—both in the memories of the survivors whose babies she attempted to give a dignified birth, the lives of the few children who left the camp alive, and the work of her own children, all of whom survived the war and became physicians themselves.