Edna’s Psychological Transformation and the Cost of Survival
When eight-year-old Edna Szurek became Stefcia Skołkowska, she didn’t just change her name. She had to forget how to be Jewish and learn how to be Catholic. She had to bury her mother’s face in memory and pretend to be an orphan. She had to perform not her identity but her very self, knowing that a single mistake could mean death.
The psychological cost of this transformation would shape the rest of her life.
The Transformation Begins
In 1942, Edna and her sister Miriam escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto. They went to a Catholic cemetery and found the graves of two dead girls: Stefcia and Marysia Skołkowska. They took those names. They became those girls.
For Edna, at age eight, this meant learning an entirely new way to be.
She had to master Catholic prayers she’d never heard before. She learned to cross herself, to genuflect, to carry rosary beads. She attended mass every Sunday. She memorized the Lord’s Prayer and recited it aloud every night, kneeling by her bed where the landlady could hear.
She had to speak Polish perfectly, with no trace of a “Jewish accent.” She had to dress like a Catholic Polish girl, act like one, think like one. She invented a life story and had to remember every detail.
She had to hide who she was from everyone: neighbors, classmates, landlords, other children who might innocently reveal her secret.
And she had to do all of this perfectly, every single day, knowing that one mistake in her Catholic prayers, one wrong word, one slip, and she would be discovered. And discovery meant death.
The Visions That Survival Demanded
In the church where she took refuge, little Edna saw Jesus’s heart beating.
This wasn’t divine intervention. This was a seven or eight-year-old’s mind fracturing under unbearable pressure.
What saved her wasn’t faith. It was her own ferocious will to live. Her intelligence. Her courage. Her ability to become someone else so completely that even her own unconscious mind believed it.
Because that’s what survival required. You cannot fake your way past Nazi interrogators. You cannot pretend through checkpoint inspections. You cannot playact religious devotion so perfectly that neighbors never suspect. Not for days, not for years.
The only way to survive was to make Stefcia real. And Edna, brilliant, brave, desperate Edna, did exactly that.
When the False Self Becomes the Good Self
But here’s what no one tells you about creating a false identity to survive: the labels flip.
The little Jewish girl with the brown eyes that could betray her became the dangerous self. Those eyes had to be trained never to look sad, never to look afraid, never to show the fear that marked Jews trying to pass. One moment of “sad eyes” and someone would know.
But she had advantages. Blonde hair. Perfect Polish learned at home from her parents. She was too young for school, but Polish was the language of her childhood, spoken fluently, without accent.
Still, one moment of saying the wrong words, an incorrect accent, a mistake in her Catholic prayers, and she would be discovered. And discovery meant death.
Edna, the true self, the Jewish girl from Warsaw, became the one who had to hide. The dangerous identity. The self that meant death.
Stefcia, the false self, the invention, became safety. The “good appearance.” The good Polish Catholic girl who could walk freely, who could look Germans in the eye, who could live.
When your true self can get you killed and your false self keeps you alive, the psyche does something devastating: it begins to prefer the lie.
Not consciously. Edna never stopped knowing she was Jewish. But deep in the survival centers of her brain, Stefcia became the self worth protecting. The self worth making real.
So her mind gave her what she needed: visions of the Sacred Heart beating in that church. Dreams of Jesus carrying her away from burning Warsaw. Not because she was converting, but because you cannot sustain a performance this perfect. The only way to be Stefcia convincingly enough to survive was to let Stefcia become real.
The Severing
And there was no one to stop her from disappearing into Stefcia completely. No one to remind her who Edna was.
Her mother had died of starvation in the ghetto. Her father was gone. When she and Miriam became Stefcia and Marysia, they couldn’t even talk to each other about who they really were. It was too dangerous. Even sisters, even sharing the same terrible secret, had to maintain the performance between themselves.
This is what psychologists call attachment rupture, the complete severing from everyone who knew your true self. Every person who had ever called her Edna, who had ever seen her as Jewish, who could have anchored her to who she really was, gone.
She lived among people, but utterly alone. A desert island inside her own mind.
The Child Soldier
At nine years old, Stefcia joined the Polish Home Army.
Not Edna pretending to be Stefcia. Stefcia. Because by then, the false self wasn’t false anymore.
That’s what saved her life when she ran messages through sniper fire during the Warsaw Uprising. You cannot fake that kind of courage. You cannot pretend to belong when bullets are flying. The Polish fighters had to believe she was one of them, and the only way to make them believe it was to believe it herself.
So Stefcia became the brave one. The soldier. The girl who earned two military decorations at age ten.
Edna, the Jewish child who had lost everything, receded further into the background. Not gone. Never gone. But no longer the primary self.
The Happiest Years
After the war, Stefcia went to an English convent school.
And there, for the first time since the ghetto, she was happy.
She was popular. She excelled at her studies. She had friends. The nuns adored her. She belonged.
But she didn’t just belong as a student. She belonged as a hero.
Stefcia was a decorated Polish Catholic war hero. At age ten, she had received two military decorations for her service in the Polish Home Army. She had fought in the Warsaw Uprising. She had been wounded by a grenade. She had survived POW camps.
The nuns and the other girls looked at her with awe and respect.
But here’s the unbearable truth: the world honored Stefania for what Edna had survived.
All the recognition, all the medals, all the respect went to the false self. The Catholic girl. Not the Jewish child who had actually endured the ghetto, the starvation, the loss of her entire family, the terror of passing.
The courage was Edna’s. The suffering was Edna’s. The survival was Edna’s.
But the acknowledgment went to Stefcia.
And at the convent, surrounded by girls who admired her bravery and nuns who praised her, Stefcia got to be normal. Popular. Safe. Happy.
While Edna, the Jewish girl who had actually lived through the horror, remained hidden. Unacknowledged. Unknown.
What does that do to a child’s sense of self? When the world celebrates a version of you that isn’t real? When your actual survival goes unrecognized because you survived it under someone else’s name? When the only way to be admired is to hide who you really are?
It would have been simpler, psychologically, if Stefcia had only been about survival. If being Catholic had been purely strategic, purely performance, purely awful.
But it wasn’t. Being Stefcia brought real connection, real belonging, real safety. The convent years were genuinely the happiest of her shattered childhood.
And all of it belonged to someone she wasn’t.
Stefcia got the medals, the friends, the happiness, the recognition.
Edna got the trauma.
And that made it impossible to leave Stefania behind.
The Cost That Never Ended
The war ended. Edna could be Jewish again.
Except she couldn’t. Not completely.
You cannot ask a child to fracture her identity that deeply, to make her false self that real, and then expect her to simply put herself back together. The psyche doesn’t work that way.
She kept the rosary. The crucifix. The prayer book. The name Stefania, woven permanently into her identity.
Not as souvenirs. As evidence of what survival had cost: a piece of herself she could never fully reclaim.
For the rest of her life, Edna carried symptoms that psychologists would recognize: hypervigilance, the inability to ever feel completely safe, a part of herself that remained forever on alert. The war had ended, but her nervous system never got the message.
And the dreams. The dreams of Jesus never stopped.
Because trauma doesn’t live in the conscious mind. It lives deeper, in the place where a seven-year-old’s brain did what it had to do to survive, and created visions and beliefs that could never be fully undone.
The Permanent Fracture
This is what extreme childhood trauma does. It creates what psychologists call a “false self” for survival, but when that false self has to be maintained perfectly, completely, without break, for years during the most formative period of development, it stops being false. It becomes real. A parallel identity that the psyche cannot fully shed.
Edna remained fiercely Jewish. Ask her son, her grandchildren, anyone who knew her. She never wavered in her Jewish identity.
And she kept Stefania for eighty years.
Both were true. Both had to be true. Because you cannot survive what she survived and come out unchanged.
She was grateful to Catholicism for giving her the tools to live. Grateful for the disguise that worked. But it wasn’t the disguise that saved her. It was her own extraordinary courage in making that disguise so convincingly real that even her dreams believed it.
The price was permanent. A fracture in the self that never fully healed. A scar that looked like a rosary, a prayer book, a name.
Stefania wasn’t who she became. Stefania was what it cost her to stay alive.
