It was only after her grandmother's death that Maniucha Bikont discovered the full extent of her secret. Lea Horovitz had decided to escape incarceration in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto in 1940 after overhearing two shopkeepers comment "she doesn't look like a zduva" (a "yid") on spotting the Star of David on her coat.
"She realized in that moment she should rip off her badge and buy a new identity," says 26-year old Bikont, sitting in a cafe in Warsaw as she retells her grandmother's extraordinary, but by no means unique, tale. And so it was that Horovitz survived Nazi-occupied Warsaw hiding behind the make-believe Polish persona of Wilhelmina Skulska, who went on to become a successful writer of detective novels.
Her daughter Anna — Bikont's mother — was well into her 30s when she stumbled across the truth. But Wilhelmina, by now well assimilated and scared of yet again becoming a victim of repeated postwar anti-Semitic campaigns, refused to discuss the matter. And when the first Jewish kindergarten in Warsaw since the war opened in 1991, she disapproved of the fact that Bikont was among the first "intakes."