Maria Świergocka — formal portrait, undated; the styling and dress suggest the 1930s or 1940s. The image is captioned MARIA SWIERGOCKA at the bottom in the source.
Sophie’s mother — born Maria Świergocka in 1890 in Poland, a lawyer’s daughter and a devout Catholic. She gave Sophie the second name Julia in honor of her own father, the maternal grandfather Sophie would never meet.
She survived the German occupation; she survived the war; she survived her husband’s death at Majdanek. By the 1950s she was finally preparing to emigrate to the United States to join Sophie in New York — and she died around 1959 in Poland, on the eve of the move. Mother and daughter, separated by the war and the ocean for two decades, would not see each other again. The 1970 FBI file and the 2005 SIP obituary both reference the death in Poland; like her husband’s name, the name Maria Świergocka survives in this record only because the FBI background-check process pulled it.