Maria SKARŻYŃSKA
Maria was born to Kazimierz and Zofia in Warsaw, Poland, on April 25th, four months before the start of the second world war. During the war her father worked as Secretary General of the International Red Cross. He produced a highly accurate report concerning the murder of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn. This report placed full responsibility for these war crimes at the feet of Stalin and the Russian secret forces. As a direct result, Maria’s family was smuggled out of Russian-occupied Poland immediately after the war, never to return. This was a loss that she always carried deep within her.
After several years of exile and waiting in various European countries, the whole family was reunited in Canada in 1949. Maria’s early experiences started on a ranch near Kisbey, Saskatchewan. She became a Canadian Citizen in 1951, something that she was always very proud of. In 1952 the family moved to Calgary. Both Maria and her brother Marek received most of their education at traditional boarding schools.
Maria attended Sacred Heart Convent, then became a nurse in the late 1950’s. She worked in multiple hospitals from Calgary to Vancouver and all the way up to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. In the mid 1960’s she settled in Calgary and worked at the Holy Cross and Foothills hospitals. She was described as an excellent nurse: kind, giving, and intelligent. She was both lead nurse of the open-heart surgery team, and head nurse of neurosurgery at various points during her career. She worked with some of the country’s leading neurosurgeons at the time, one of whom, Dr. Charles Taylor, described her as, in a word: “irreplaceable”.
In the early 1980’s Maria left nursing and went into medical sales with 3M Canada. She also started a long and deeply committed phase of her life where she dedicated much of her energy to supporting Polish causes – both in Canada, and in Poland. This phase was to continue into the last years of her life.
She was President of the Calgary branch of the friends of the University of Lublin, raising tens of thousands of dollars to support the only free university behind the iron curtain at that time. She was Vice-President of the Solidarity Foundation in Calgary, sending hundreds of parcels to imprisoned Solidarity activists, and was President of the Canadian Polish Congress in the late 1980s- advocating tirelessly for provincial grants to support the Polish community. As the official delegate of the Canadian Polish Congress, she participated in a small group of volunteers who sponsored over 1500 Polish Immigrants to Canada, personally signing for fourteen families herself.
She greatly enjoyed a succession of summers as the camp nurse with the Polish Scouting Association and was zealously involved in the “Poland in the Rockies” series, along with multiple other Polish cultural initiatives too numerous to list.
In her last home at the Colonel Belcher Independent living center, she interviewed other residents about their lives, publishing these alongside pictures of the residents in the center’s newsletter. She continued to spend many hours at the Polish church, and at Polish Veteran’s meetings. She won many awards, much recognition, and never mentioned any of it. She was constantly striving to live a meaningful life and to stay young in her heart and mind.
Maria Skarzynski passed away on 10 December 2025, at the age of 86 years.
Copyright: Skarzynski family