Bartlakowski Leonard

Bartlakowski, Leonard Leonard Bartlakowski was the Berlin-born son of a Polish family that had been naturalized in Germany. In the midst of a mission he was on with his air squadron, which was on its way to bombard Warsaw, he defected by parachuting from the plane. Under disguise, he somehow managed to reach Lwow, and there the Soviets incarcerated him. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lwow was occupied by the Germans and the political prisoners set free, Bartlakowski among them. He had assumed the identity of one Robert Krysinski and was posted at nearby Rawa Ruska as a (presumably uniformed) German-Polish interpreter for the local Gestapo. It was there that Abraham Weinfeld first met him. Bartlakowski, alias Krysinski, was standing guard with a German soldier over Jews queuing for a piece of bread. The next day as the German interpreter entered Weinfeld’s pharmacy to ask for razor blades, Weinfeld ingratiated himself by offering him a pack of blades free of charge. Thus, against all odds and circumstances, began a remarkable friendship. Rawa Ruska lay at the route of the transports that carried Polish Jews to the Belzec death camp, less than 30 kilometers away. Bartlakowski, whose office was located at the railway station, was exceptionally well placed to obtain advance information of impending raids and transports. He would notify Weinfeld, who, in turn, transmitted the information in code to various Jewish Councils in the vicinity. One day Bartlakowski learned that the local Gestapo had received instructions from the Lwow Gestapo to have empty cattle trucks ready for the shipment of the Rawa Ruska Jews to Belzec. He immediately notified Weinfeld but also entered the ghetto himself in disguise in the middle of the night in order to warn the people. He offered to shelter his friend and his wife in his home, but Weinfeld, who still had an alternative hiding place in the pharmacy, refused and asked him to hide his sister-in-law, Romana Kessler, and Dr. Stephanie Reicher instead. It was only a few months later, in mid-June 1943, that the Weinfelds joined them. All four hid in the small apartment until the liberation of Rawa Ruska on July 27, 1944. The hiding place was a hole about 3 cubic feet deep dug in the earth under the bed. Acquiring food was an especially tricky business, as Bartlakowski could not buy in quantities sufficient for five people without arousing suspicion. He was thus compelled to steal from his work place at the railway station. At one time the rumors that he was hiding Jews were so widespread that the Gestapo came to inspect the house with a dog. However, Bartlakowski managed to fob the visitors off with liquor. As Weinfeld later testified: “His heart and nerves must have been made of steel and he had the courage necessary [for] a pilot to survive so many months with us and not collapse psychologically.” After the war Bartlakowski returned to Germany to join his mother and sister in Berlin. He died prematurely in 1953, at the age of 36, of tuberculosis contracted while in the Soviet prison in Lwow. The Weinfelds, who had emigrated to Australia, corresponded with him for some time, until they learned that he had died. On September 4, 1979, Yad Vashem recognized Leonard Bartlakowski as Righteous Among the Nations.