Charaszkiewicz Maria

Charaszkiewicz, Maria In 1939, after the Soviets annexed Lwow to the Soviet Union, Maria Charaszkiewicz moved to Warsaw, where she decided to try and ease the plight of the Jews. After the ghetto was set up in Warsaw, Charaszkiewicz, wearing the Star of David armband, smuggled food into the ghetto and distributed it among the needy. In 1941, after the Germans captured Lwow, Charaszkiewicz returned to her native town to help Jewish friends who were being persecuted by the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists. At enormous personal risk, Charaszkiewicz, together with a Ukrainian friend, managed to save the two daughters of her friends, Janek and Cesia Lewin, by providing them with “Aryan” documents and finding shelter for them outside the city. Charaszkiewicz also found a hiding place for the girls’ parents in Warsaw, where they spent the war under an assumed identity. In 1942, during one of the large-scale Aktionen in the Lwow ghetto, Charaszkiewicz managed to smuggle Kamila Landau, a dentist with whom she had studied, out of the ghetto. After obtaining “Aryan” documents for her, Charaszkiewicz took her to her sister’s home in Grodek Jagiellonski. When her sister’s neighbors became suspicious, Charaszkiewicz brought Landau back with her to Lwow, where she stayed until the area was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944. In risking her life to save Jews, Charaszkiewicz was guided by compassion and a loyalty that triumphed over adversity. On June 26, 1976, Yad Vashem recognized Maria Charaszkiewicz as Righteous Among the Nations.