Maria Kotarba

Who was Maria Kotarba?

Maria Kotarba was a courier in the Polish resistance movement, smuggling clandestine messages and supplies among the local partisan groups. She was arrested, tortured and interrogated by the Gestapo as a political prisoner before being imprisoned in Tarnów and then deported to Auschwitz on January 6, 1943. Maria Kotarba was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem on September 18, 2005 for risking her life to save the lives of Jewish prisoners in two concentration camps.

After the Nazi German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Maria Kotarba, a Catholic, witnessed the extermination of her Jewish neighbours near Gorlice, where she lived, and vowed to aid any Jew she could. Arriving at Auschwitz in the winter of 1943 she was allocated the prisoner number 27995, and after a range of camp duties, in the middle of 1943 was assigned to Kommando Gartnerei, the Gardening Commando labour squad. She worked in the confiscated gardens around the nearby village of Rajsko, involved in the cultivation of vegetables and other ancillary labours. By the summer of 1943, the resistance movement in the camp became organised and brought Kotarba into their ranks.