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Saternus family album

An album by Józef Saternus and Leokadia Saternus née Kanclerz, containing photographs documenting the smuggling of food into the Warsaw ghetto, inserted before other family photographs from the occupation period (also an interesting testimony of the era).

The photos of the smugglers were taken, judging from the different shots of the sequence, by at least two photographers, including perhaps Józef Saternus (however he can be seen in two or three photos). We know only two names from among his close colleagues who asssited him in the food smuggling: Aleksander Cesarski (who lived on Śliska Street in the pre-war period) and Mieczysław Tabor. Saternus was active in the resistance during the war, the smugglers were also soldiers of the underground, and – according to the account of Józef Saternus's son, Marek, who donated the photographs to the POLIN Museum – the action was not officially planned by the Home Army, but was carried out with the consent of the authorities.

Józef Saternus passed the album on to his son many years after the war, when the latter was already of mature age; at that time he also informed him what the album contained. We can surmise that Józef Saternus developed the photographs and composed the album already during the war, and kept it at home, however dangerous this might have been in the event of a search. The album, the donor emphasises, would not simply have been an exceptional item in this respect, as he possessed other objects the discovery of which by the Germans would have resulted in arrest or death, the most obvious of which was weapon (as a child, Marek Saternus found weapons from this time that were still hidden in the house). The album would therefore have survived in the flat which was not destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising, because the Saternus family (as well as the Kanclerz family; Józef Saternus and Leokadia Kanclerz married shortly after the war) lived on the right bank of the Vistula, in a tenement house at 13 Ząbkowska Street. This is also where Józef's father, Franciszek Saternus, had a furniture store (in an outbuilding), while the shop was located on Bagno Street. It is likely that the people to whom food was smuggled were known to Józef Saternus from the pre-war period precisely from the Bagno area (we know one name of an acquaintance from the pre-war period: Natan Tenenbaum, a peer who worked at the Nożyk Synagogue; however, we do not know whether he stayed in the ghetto). The smuggling itself – as the first photo in the album seems to indicate – was conducted through the ghetto wall stretching along this street. Some of the pictures show a signboard of a furniture shop on the Aryan side – probably the shop of Franciszek Saternus.

Przemysław Kaniecki

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