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Maria Borkowska-Flisek (born 1933) comes from a family that once lived on Warsaw's Nowolipki and Krochmalna streets. Her grandmother, Ewa Borkowska, sold eggs. She was the mother of six sons and one daughter. One of the sons, Ignacy Borkowski, was a famous surgeon at the Orthodox Hospital in Czyste. In the Warsaw ghetto, he worked at 1 Leszno Street, where surgical departments were moved. Almost all members of Mrs. Maria's family died in the Holocaust. She and her parents ended up in Lviv. From there, the family was deported by the NKVD deep into the USSR, first in the Mari Autonomous Republic, and then in the Kuybyshev Oblast (today's Samara Oblast). Her father, Stanisław Borkowski, was appointed director of the Home for Invalids and Polish Orphans. In 1943, he was arrested and then sentenced to 10 years in the gulag. Mrs. Maria received the news of his death many years later, when she was already living in Gdańsk and trying to find information about the fate of her father.