Krystyna Skarbek - Early Life

Early Life

Skarbek was born in Warsaw, Poland, to Count Jerzy Skarbek, a Catholic, and Stefania née Goldfeder, the daughter of a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. Marrying Stefania in late December 1899, Jerzy Skarbek used her dowry (her father was a banker) to pay his debts and continue his lavish life-style.

Notable relations included the composer Fryderyk Chopin, Chopin's godfather and prison reformer Fryderyk Skarbek, and United States Union General Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski.

The couple's first child, Andrzej (Andrew), took after the mother's side of the family. Krystyna, their second child, took after her father and his liking for riding horses, which she sat astride rather than side-saddle. She also became an expert skier during visits to Zakopane in the Tatra mountains of southern Poland. From the start, there was a complete rapport between father and daughter, who needed little encouragement to become a tomboy.

It was at the family stables that Krystyna first met Andrzej Kowerski, whose father had brought him over to play with ten-year-old Krystyna while he and her father, the Count, discussed agricultural matters.

The 1920s left the family in straitened financial circumstances, and they had to give up their country estate and move to Warsaw. In 1930, when Krystyna was 22, Count Jerzy died. The Goldfeder financial empire had almost completely collapsed, and there was barely enough money to support the widowed Countess Stefania. Krystyna, not wishing to be a burden to her mother, took a job at a Fiat dealership but soon became ill from automobile fumes and had to give up the job. At first, she was thought, on the basis of shadows on her chest x-rays, to be suffering from tuberculosis, which had killed her father. She received compensation from her employer's insurance company and took her physicians' advice to lead as much of an open-air life as she could. She began spending a great deal of time hiking and skiing the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland.

Krystyna married a young businessman, Karol Getlich; but they were incompatible, and the marriage soon ended without rancour. A subsequent love affair came to naught when the young man's mother refused to consider the penniless divorcée as a potential daughter-in-law.

One day, on a Zakopane ski slope, Krystyna lost control and was saved by a giant of a man who stepped into her path and stopped her descent. Her rescuer was Jerzy (in English, George) Giżycki, a brilliant, moody, irascible eccentric, who came from a wealthy family in Ukraine. At fourteen, he had quarrelled with his father, run away from home, and worked in the United States as a cowboy and gold prospector. He eventually became an author and travelled the world in search of material for his books and articles. He knew Africa well and hoped one day to return there.

On 2 November 1938, Krystyna and Jerzy Giżycki married at the Evangelical Reformed Church in Warsaw. Soon after, he accepted a diplomatic posting to Ethiopia, where he served as Poland’s consul general until September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Skarbek would later say of Giżycki: "He was my Svengali for so many years that he would never believe that I could ever leave him for good."