Thanks to the books she has written, the rituals, fables, legends, songs and proverbs of the world that seemed to have been expunged by the Holocaust can be revived today.

As early as 1917 Janiszewski and Mazurkiewicz were conducting a topology seminar, presumably the first in that new, exuberantly developing field. The meeting of that seminar, taken up to a large extent with sometimes quite vehement discussions between Janiszewski and Mazurkiewicz, were a real intellectual treat for the participants.

There is no doubt that Janiszewski, Mazurkiewicz, Kuratowski, and Sierpiński had a huge impact on Stanisława's mathematical education. In 1919, she attended two courses by Janiszewski: selected topics in topology and a seminar on topology. It must have been Janiszewski who introduced her to the problem of continua disconnecting a plane, the problem of her doctoral dissertation. In 1921, Mazurkiewicz lectured on Jordanian continua, which was also one of her interests.

Yesterday I met professor Stanisław Ruziewicz from Lwów. I spent the entire evening enjoying sweets and a lively discussion in the company of professors of mathematics.

It is commonly believed that it was Sierpiński who encouraged Otton to start publishing his results, but I am certain that is not the truth. The correspondence of the newly married couple with Stanisława's family presents the story in a different way. In my opinion, Stanisława and some friends from Kraków had far more impact on Otton than Sierpiński did.

They often sit together studying algebra, and Otton told me that she [Stanisława] is extremely talented, has a masculine mind, and yet is so feminine and childlike.

Otton says that we must learn to fight against all the obstacles that fate sends our way and appreciate our victory, when we will receive the necessary diplomas for which we are striving and embark upon a new creative life. Otton believes that I will accomplish very nice things, for he sees how I am going about mathematics. Really, I have benefited a lot recently and I owe a great deal to Otton. He said that he senses all the happiness coming to us together, including good health and our doctorates.

In my work published in the XII volume of 'Fundamenta Mathematicae' I have demonstrated a lemma which can be regarded as analogous to the following very elementary theorem.

"If $p_{1}, p_{2}, ..., p_{n}, ...$ is a sequence of different real numbers tending to p, we can extract from it a partial sequence which converges to p in a monotonic manner".

The lemma I am talking about expresses a property of the plane and, basically, it is contained in a method of R L Moore used by American topologists to deal with different questions concerning Jordanian continua.
...
It is by means of the notion of monotonic convergence that I have demonstrated in the XII volume of 'Fundamenta Mathematicae' a theorem expressing a necessary and sufficient condition for a subcontinuum of a Jordanian and plane continuum to be itself Jordanian. By means of a slightly different notion, I recently found with Otton Nikodym a necessary and sufficient condition which must be satisfied by a Jordanian continuum and plane J, so that the property of being Jordanian for any subcontinuum C of J, is equivalent to the known property, found by R L Moore for the relative complement J-C.

During the war, of course, the German Nazis were fairly efficient at exterminating the Polish intelligentsia.  Nikodym and his wife escaped into the countryside, disguised as peasants. They were sheltered for the duration of the war in a small village, hidden and fed by the peasants. In exchange for being taken care of, they tutored the village children in arithmetic, and sometimes in other subjects, generally at the primary level.

Dr Stanisława Nikodym [is appointed] as visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics. Dr Nikodym was born in Moscow and studied at the Gymnasium of Latin in Warsaw and the University of Warsaw where she was granted her Doctor's degree in Mathematics. She was an instructor in Higher Mathematics for six years at the Higher Polytechnical School in Warsaw and has delivered lectures on topology to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Bologna. She is the author of numerous textbooks and papers, printed in Polish, Italian, and French.

In the early days [at Kenyon College] the Nikodyms went to class together; he lectured from a prepared text and she helped field the questions.  They were a dramatic contrast to the usual inhabitants of central Ohio, moving together through this strange culture and language.  The small college town was a big help: there was usually someone who could translate, by way of French or German, if there was difficulty communicating in the butcher shop or at the barber, and the shopkeepers knew the college would straighten out any problems By a few years later, his English had improved enough to manage questions himself and his wife no longer needed to attend his classes.

By the time I was a student at Kenyon and took a course from Nikodym (an introduction to Hilbert Space, using the text by Halmos) in the early 1960's, he was in his eighties.  A small man, somewhat stooped over, he was driven to work every morning by his wife. She followed two paces behind as he walked to his office, removed his coat for him and hung it up, then went home until she returned for him in the evening. ... A high point of our undergraduate education was being invited home for dinner at the Nikodym home. It was a small but elegant apartment carved from a large house on a  hilltop owned by the college, built well over a century ago as the palace of the then Episcopal Bishop of Ohio. Mrs Nikodym served what seemed to us a very European dinner, and with some prompting from her husband told of their earlier lives and especially their hiding out during the Second World War.