(Notes from Poland) Agnieszka Wadolowska - Shevah Weiss, who became Israel's ambassador to Poland and Speaker of the Knesset, has thanked the journalists who found a Polish family who saved him from the Holocaust. Weiss was born in 1935 in the then-Polish city of Boryslaw, which was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941. After his family spent several months hiding in their own home behind a "double wall," they moved to the cellar of a neighboring house, where they spent 21 months. Their survival would not have been possible without the assistance of ethnic Poles and Ukrainians who helped hide them and brought them food. While Weiss recalled the names of some of those neighbors, during work on a Polish documentary about Weiss, the director, Maciej Dutkiewicz, found an old family photo album that had belonged to Weiss' father that contained photographs of another family who helped the Weisses survive. A journalistic investigation led to Maria Rosinczuk (nee Malendewicz), 97, who still remembers the Weiss family. "The Weiss family was hiding in a shrine close to our orchard," Maria told Onet, a Polish news website. "They had to stay there the whole time as in Boryslaw a pogrom was being prepared...and it wasn't permitted to hide anyone. If anyone denounced, anyone noticed, it was the end. It would be the end of everything. They would just shoot them dead....We knew each other. How could we refuse, when someone asked for help?"
2021-05-13 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive