Charmuszko Paweł

Charmuszko, Paweł In July 1941, when the Germans occupied the village of Lososna, in the Grodno district, Paweł Charmuszko decided to help his fellow Jews. His neighbors, the only Jews in the village, were the first to benefit from Charmuszko’s heroic resolve. Fearing the antisemitic inhabitants of the village, Charmuszko risked his life by transferring his Jewish neighbors to nearby Grodno, without expecting anything in return. Charmuszko also smuggled Jews out of the Grodno ghetto, mostly to Warsaw, where he provided them with “Aryan” documents and arranged hiding places for them. Between November 1941 and April 1942, Charmuszko helped about twenty Jews escape from Grodno to Warsaw. Most remained on the Aryan side of the city or in the vicinity, and were liberated by the Red Army. On one of his visits to Warsaw, Charmuszko contacted Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, who described Charmuszko’s efforts on behalf of the Jews in his dissertation on Jewish-Polish relations during the occupation period. Among the Jews Charmuszko saved were: engineer Fajersztajn, Jacob and Helena Lipszyc, engineer Jerzy Lacher and his wife and baby daughter, and engineer Berg. After the war, the survivors, who emigrated, described Charmuszko as a person of great compassion, who was prepared to lay down his life in order to help Jews. On May 28, 1968, Yad Vashem recognized Paweł Charmuszko as Righteous Among the Nations.