Szmuel Warkowicki was born in 1898 in Dubnow, Poland, and worked as a bank manager. His wife, Ita (née Grabowski) was a midwife and they had two daughters, Luba and Frida.
In December 1941, some six months after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the Warkowickis were incarcerated in the Łuck ghetto together with the city's approximately 19,000 Jews. Initially, Szmuel found employment as a bookkeeper for the Judenrat and Ita worked as a nurse, but rumors of the ghetto's impending liquidation were soon rife, and the couple made the decision to try and escape the looming threat of death.
With the help of a Polish friend whose wife Ita had assisted in several births, the family escaped from the ghetto in August 1942. Frida and Luba were taken in by non-Jewish acquaintances, while Ita moved from place to place with false papers. Armed with paints and a pack of cards that he had drawn in the ghetto, Szmuel took on a Polish name – Michael Wasilewski – and wandered between villages telling residents that he had lost all his documents and possessions in a fire. A priest to whom he revealed his true identity provided him with a cross, clothes, supplies and food, and instructed him as to how to travel from one village to another.
The locals warmed to Szmuel, and commissioned religious icons and portraits, as well as drawings for their children, such as this one depicting a dog and a cat, a goat and a bear, a pig and a raven, a duck and a rabbit, and a fox and a hen inside colorful squares.
The Red Army reached the village where Szmuel was staying in mid-1944, and he commenced his journey back to Łuck in search of his family. He found his wife Ita and his daughter Frida, but discovered that his first-born daughter Luba had been murdered while in hiding. Szmuel and Ita had a son, Avraham, in 1946, and in March 1948 they immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine).
Frida eventually donated her father's drawings to Yad Vashem to be preserved in perpetuity.
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