Plate

After the Second World War, there was an almost complete population resettlement in Western Pomerania. The new settlers lived in abandoned houses, with furniture, kitchen utensils and tableware left behind. Among the newcomers to the city was Helena Kurcyusz (1914-1999), daughter of Zygmunt Słomiński, the former interwar mayor of Warsaw, and Teresa Słomińska,née Paszkiewicz. She had managed to graduate from the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology before the start of the Second World War. During the defence of Warsaw in September 1939, she was a member of the Technical Ambulance Service providing assistance to the wounded. With time she became involved with the underground Union of Armed Struggle, and then the Home Army. As a consequence of her conspiracy activity she was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned on Aleja Szucha Avenue and the Pawiak prison in October 1942. From January 1943 to April 1944 she was detained in the concentration camp at Majdanek, from where she was transferred to the camp in Ravensbrück, and then Neubrandenburg. After the end of the war, on her return to Warsaw, she stopped in Szczecin, where she took up a job in the Building Department of the Municipal Office and, from 1946, in the Regional Spatial Planning Headquarters, acting as the chief town planner of the Szczecin Province, as well as keeping an inventory of historical monuments. Choosing to remain in Szczecin, Helena Kurcyusz moved into a villa at ul. Stanisława Wyspiańskiego 7, while taking over the furniture and much decorative tableware left behind by the previous owners. One of these was a porcelain plate, preserved in fairly good condition, produced by one of the most famous and expensive porcelain manufactures in Europe, Königliche Porzallen Manufaktur, signed with the letters KMP. Together with other memorabilia and personal objects, it was donated to the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin after Kurcyuszowa's death in 1999. Anna Lew-Machniak