Maria Borowska-Bayer (Maria Rundo) - was born in 1920 in Warsaw. She came from an intelligentsia family of assimilated Jews. Just before the war she graduated with a high school diploma and during the occupation she was sent to one of the first underground Polish Literature study classes. That's where she met her future husband, Tadeusz Borowski, who immortalized her in his short stories "Farewell to Maria." In March 1943, while trying to arrange false documents for a friend who had escaped from the ghetto, Maria fell into a "cauldron" in an apartment on Grzybowska Street in Warsaw. The next day, in the same apartment, Tadeusz Borowski was arrested. Maria was taken from the Pawiak prison to Birkenau, where she stayed for a year and a half. She went through almost all the camp diseases including malaria and typhus. She survived by a miracle. After the war she found herself in Sweden. They did not meet Tadeusz Borowski until 1946, already in Poland. That same year they got married. In 1951 their daughter Malgorzata was born. That same year Tadeusz Borowski committed suicide. Maria remarried two years later. She worked as a journalist for the Tribune of Freedom, the World and Poland, and You and Me. She died in December 2001.