Polish family who saved future Israeli ambassador from Holocaust found seven decades later

A Polish family who saved Shevah Weiss – who later became Israel’s ambassador to Poland and speaker of its parliament, the Knesset – from the Holocaust has been discovered over seven decades later. Weiss himself has thanked the journalists who found his rescuers.

Weiss was born to a Jewish family in 1935 in the then Polish city of Borysław (now Boryslav in Ukraine). It was part of the territories invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941.

While around 90% of Poland’s prewar population of over three million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and some managed to flee occupied Europe, Weiss and his family survived the war in hiding.

First, they spent several months in their own home behind a “double wall” that his father had built in advance. Then, when that was no longer safe, they were moved to the cellar of a neighbouring house, where they spent 21 months.

Their survival would not have been possible without the assistance of their neighbours – both ethnic Poles and Ukrainians – who helped hide them and brought them food.

Weiss himself later spoke of his gratitude to the neighbours. Naming the Góral and Potężny families, as well as a Roman Szczepaniuk and a Ms Lasotowa, in a 2018 Facebook post he described them as “amazing people, my heroes…[who] will always be in my heart”.

“It all wouldn’t have been possible without the Righteous [Among the Nations],” he added, referring to the name given by Israel to those recognised as helping Jews survive the Holocaust.

However it later transpired that Weiss was not aware of a further family who had helped him survive the war. The story came to light during the production of a Polish documentary, So far away, so close (“Tak daleko, tak blisko”), which premiered at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw in 2019.

Based on the biography of Weiss, it depicted his early years in Borysław, his survival during the Second World War, and his later career in Israel, including serving as ambassador to Poland in 2001-2003 as well as president of the Yad Vashem Council.

During work on the film, the director, Maciej Dutkiewicz, found photographs in an old family photo album that had belonged to Weiss’s father. It contained photographs of another family who helped the Weisses survive the Holocaust.

There were three photos with captions “Zosia, 17 years old, Krystyna, 18 years old, Andrzej, 15 years old – grandchildren of Malendewicz”. The images were most likely sent to Israel from the Polish city of Wałbrzych in 1965 or 1968.

“More Righteous about whom I knew nothing,” wrote Weiss after the discovery was made. He appealed on Facebook for help in finding the family.

The filmmakers took it upon themselves to help with the search. “Unfortunately the pandemic disrupted our plans,” said Dutkiewicz, talking to Onet, a Polish news website.

However, a journalistic investigation led by Piotr Kaszuwara of Onet was more successful. He received the former address of the family from a branch of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Wroclaw.

The family in question had moved from Borysław (now Boryslav) to Wałbrzych after the end of the war. The journalists drove there, but found no one at the given address. However, they talked to neighbours and left their contact details.

A few days later they received a call. It was a great-granddaughter of Maria Rosińczuk (née Malendewicz), who said that Maria, now 97 years old, still remembers the Second World War and the Weiss family.

“The Weiss family was hiding in a shrine close to our orchard,” Maria told Onet. “They had to stay there the whole time as in Borysław 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.”

When asked about the motives behind helping the Weiss family, she asked rhetorically, “Is it possible to answer such a question?” She went on to say they did it out of “our kindness”.

“We knew each other. How could we refuse, when someone asked for help?” she added, saying that her family had known the Weisses, who owned a shop, before the war and that they were “honourable” people.

She also recalled the constant fear of those hiding Jews. “When a German stormed in, he didn’t ask for anything. Just at once: ‘Juden? Juden?'” And if he found one, he would kill not only the Jew, “but everyone in the house”.

She added that the reason Weiss may not have previously been aware of her family’s name was that he thought they were also Górals, which was the surname of her grandparents on her mother’s side.

“Thank you very much for finding them,” Weiss, who is currently ill and hospitalised in Israel, told Onet. “I am sure that if Mr Dutkiewicz hadn’t found the photo album, the mystery of the Malendewiczes would never have been solved.”

Main image credit: Adrian Grycuk/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0 PL)

Agnieszka Wądołowska

Agnieszka Wądołowska is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She has previously worked for Gazeta.pl and Tokfm.pl and contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy, Duży Format, Midrasz and Kultura Liberalna