In Poland, hiding Jews or any other form of their support was punishable by death. At best, you could end up in a prison or a concentration camp. These heroes were willing to pay the ultimate price.
How high the degree of threat was for Poles who even offered insignificant help to Jews is perfectly illustrated by the example from Mazovia:
In the village of Sadowne (Węgrów County), in March 1943, the Germans met a Jew eating a bread roll. After a short time, they killed him, and for selling or offering a bun, they shot a Polish baker, his wife and 16-year-old son .
In occupied Poland, helping Jews was threatened with imprisonment, deportation to a camp, and even death.
Similar stories were repeated in countless localities. More than once it happened that a gendarmerie unit surrounded a farm and murdered the entire family helping Jews. Then the buildings were blown up, thus destroying the entire property of these people.
The bodies of the murdered were not allowed to be buried in the cemetery, they were buried in random places, somewhere in a ditch or behind a fence. They were also denied their last priestly ministry. This procedure was designed to intimidate other potential carers of people of Jewish nationality. In small communities, such activities must have made an electrifying impression, especially when their victims were neighbors or friends. Here are three of these stories.
The tragedy of the Ulma family
The tragic fate of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their children, inhabitants of the village of Markowa, who from the end of 1942 hid eight Jews - the Saul and Goldman families - are particularly well known.
The Ulmas took eight Jews in hiding under their roof. They paid the highest penalty for this. In the photo Wiktoria Ulma with children.
The denunciator turned out to be a "navy blue" policeman, Włodzimierz Leś, who himself at the beginning of the German occupation helped the Saul family in return for a salary. When Saul's funds ran out, he threw them out of their hiding place, and they found refuge with the Ulmas. The woodsman somehow found out about it. When the Red Army began to approach these areas, the policeman, perhaps fearing that he would have to return his fraudulent property, decided to get rid of them.
Four gendarmes and four "navy blue" policemen under the command of Lieutenant Eilert Dieken appeared before dawn on March 24, 1944 near the Ulmas' property. Among them was also Włodzimierz Leś. The whole action was prepared in an extremely meticulous way. The day before, the gendarmes ordered four carts to be put in front of the Ulma house in the evening. Each coachman was from a different village, they did not know the destination of their journey.
First, the Jews were shot. Then came the Ulmas' turn - their parents were shot in front of their children. The woman was in the last month of pregnancy. Then Dieken decided to murder the six children of Józef and Victoria. They were three girls and three boys aged 1.5 to 8 years. The torturers also plundered the belongings of the murdered. The end of this grim crime was an alcoholic binge.
Corpses of the murdered were on fire in the house
Equally macabre was the fate of the Borek family from the village of Słuszczyn, which provided food for Jews in hiding in the vicinity. On a frosty morning on January 8, 1943, the gendarmes appeared on their farm on the outskirts of Słuszczyn.
Stanisław Borek, his wife Helena, son Czesław and son-in-law Ryszard Wójtowicz were pulled out of the house in only their underwear, tied with clotheslines and brutally thrown onto the threshing floor in the barn. Józef Borek's daughter, Honorata Wójtowicz, was shot in the thigh. Perhaps she was trying to save her 10-month-old son, who was left alone in one of the rooms.
The Germans robbed the Borek family, forcing a few local peasants to help. One of them, Józef Wyroba, recalled:
When, as ordered by the gendarmes, we got on the sledge and drove towards the village, from a distance of 50 meters we saw the gendarmes chasing the Borki family from the barn to their apartment. Each of them had a bundle of straw in their hands. All of them - including Honorata Wójtowiczowa with her little child - were driven into the apartment by the Nazis, except for Stanisław Borek, whom they took on a sleigh and, following us, they took him to the police station in Leipzig.
The Germans left no illusions about the fate of those who helped Jews. In the picture, Bruno Motschall's warning against Poles hiding Jews.
We drove 250 meters when one of the gendarmes [...] walked from the yard to the outside of the building and started firing bursts from the automaton into the apartment through the window. In a moment, when we had already driven up to half a kilometer, we saw that the Borek's house was on fire. The corpses of the entire family murdered by the Nazis were burnt there .
On the same day, at the gendarmerie station in Leipzig, Stanisław Borek was beaten to death with sticks.
The property owner was killed on the spot
Barbara Kryńska's parents hid two Jewish families. It happened at the turn of 1942 and 1943 in the village of Mniszew near Warka. The Kryńskis did so out of gratitude for saving the life of Barbara, then five years old, by a doctor who was a Jew. They did not expect the consequences of the kindness shown to be disastrous for them. Barbara Kryńska recalled:
It was very cold outside. We were awakened by pounding on windows and doors and German voices. We all leapt to our feet. Dad wouldn't let them dress well. He just wore a jacket. They led him out of the house and put him against the wall. Seeing it through the window , we started screaming - then they shot at us. Wood splinters shattered and the windows fell.
For helping Jews, the Germans murdered hundreds and perhaps even thousands of Poles. The photo shows the execution of Michał Kruk and other Poles by the Germans in Przemyśl as a punishment for helping Jews in hiding.
They took my father to the village, where they spent all the Poles indicated by the Jew Mecho as sheltering him. It turned out that the Germans had captured two Jewish families that my parents had previously been hiding. They killed the property owner on the spot, because Mecho revealed that he had a buried gun under the window .
Barbara's father was taken to the prison in Radom. The mother, also arrested, was secretly released by one of the Germans during the round-up. The daughter never saw her father again. In July 1943, information came about his death in prison. The family couldn't even get his body back. He was buried in a mass grave.
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The article is an excerpt from the book by Dariusz Kaliński entitled "Balance of harms. What the German occupation of Poland really looked like. ”