EUGENIA SHRUT (TABACZYŃSKA), who died on 20 October 2003, was a member of the board of the American Association for Polish–Jewish Studies and a strong supporter of Polin. Born on 20 May 1925, she came from a well-to-do Jewish family in the small town of Kłodawa (no ‘shtetl’, the town was predominantly Catholic), in the province of Poznan´; she had two elder brothers. She was educated at the Miglasowa gymnasium in Warsaw, where she was particularly influenced by one of the teachers, the prominent historian Marian Małowist.

During the occupation the whole family moved to Warsaw, then to the Warsaw ghetto. Genia continued to attend school (which was now underground), and graduated in 1942. One of her brothers and his wife had been deported from Umschlagplatz; they perished, probably in Treblinka. Genia's parents arranged for her to go to a hiding-place on the ‘Aryan’ side, and on 19 April 1943, the first day of the uprising, she left the ghetto: a bribed watchman let her pass. She had memorized the address she was to go to, but when she arrived did not know whether to knock at the door to the left or to the right. An error could have been fatal, but she had good luck. The hiding-place was the apartment of a Mr Pawłowski, where nine Jews were living in a room whose entrance was camouflaged as a sink. Genia stayed there for fifteen months. Meanwhile, the ghetto was fully evacuated: her parents were sent to Trawniki labour camp, and her remaining brother to the camp in Poniatowa. All three perished in 1944 when, together with all the Jews of Trawniki and Poniatowa, they were shot by the Germans.

Genia came out of her hiding-place during the Polish uprising in Warsaw in August 1944. Concealing the fact that she was Jewish, she left Warsaw, together with the city's entire population, and in Pruszków she joined a Polish group that was being sent as forced labour to Brig in Upper Silesia. Liberated in the winter of 1945 by the Russians, she returned to Kłodawa to search for surviving relatives, and found her cousins Ignacy and MichałWolkowicz.