Bay Rozalia

Zemlyanskaya-Bay, Rozalia During the period of the Second World War, Rozalia Bay lived with her parents in the town of Brody (today Ternopil’, L’viv District), which was captured by the Germans on June 30, 1941. At the beginning of 1943, Leopold Grund and his younger brother Dodek moved in to the apartment opposite Rozalia Bay’s. They were quiet neighbors who tried to avoid contact with the other tenants. In time they became friends with Rozalia and revealed to her that they were not Poles but Jews from a well-to-do merchant family in Lwów. Their mother and most of their family had been murdered by the Germans and their helpers, and their father, Max Grund, was incarcerated in the notorious Janowska camp near Lwów (today L’viv). At the request of the Grund brothers, Rozalia went to Lwów and made contact with their friend, Mr. Senediak, in order to smuggle Max Grund out of the camp. Rozalia recruited her brother-in-law, who drove the fugitive from Lwów to Brody. Max Grund was thus reunited with his sons and received shelter in Rozalia’s apartment. However, life in hiding depressed him and he decided to move to the Brody ghetto in order to live among Jews and also not to endanger his sons, who had Polish papers. He perished when the ghetto was liquidated on May 21, 1943. One day in early 1944, Dodek, returning from shopping in the market, saw Rozalia waiting for him in the stairwell and signaling him to come into her own apartment. She told him that Germans and Ukrainian police were in his apartment. Through the door he heard his brother being arrested. He remained with Rozalia and her parents all that day, and the next day was accompanied to the village of Gutysko-Turianskoye Hucisko Turzańskie (now Hutys’ko-Tur’yans’ke), about 30 km from Brody, the home of an aunt of Rozalia’s, who put Dodek in touch with Soviet partisans. With their assistance, Dodek crossed the front lines near the city of Równe and joined the Soviet forces. After Dodek found out that hisbrother had been murdered he moved to Israel. It was not until the 1990s that Dodek (by then Avraham Grund) succeeded in getting in touch with Rozalia, his rescuer. On May 22, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Rozalia Bay-Zemlyanskaya as Righteous Among the Nations.