Pańczyszyn Władysław

Pańczyszyn Władysław Władysław Pańczyszyn of the city of Drohobycz, in Eastern Galicia, married Helena Reinharz, the daughter of his Jewish neighbors at the beginning of the war. In 1941, after the Germans occupied the area, Pańczyszyn found himself in personal distress. Despite this, he remained faithful to his wife and made every effort to help her family as well. While his wife’s family remained in the ghetto, Pańczyszyn, disregarding the danger to his life, entered the ghetto regularly to bring them food. After the liquidation of the ghetto, when only his wife’s sister Rosa Schweitzer remained there, he decided to save her by smuggling her out and bringing her to his home. At first, Pańczyszyn hid Schweitzer in a hiding place he prepared for her in his apartment, but because of the hostile attitude of his sister-in-law, who resented him for marrying a Jewish woman, Pańczyszyn was forced to hide not only Schweitzer, but also his own wife and their two-year-old daughter, Irena. Fearing that his sister-in-law would hand them over to the police, Pańczyszyn moved all three to Borysław. He gave his daughter to friends, and hid his wife together with her sister in a hiding place he prepared for them in the building where he worked. His wife and her sister remained in isolation there under very difficult conditions for a year and a half, surviving the crises and dangers of those terrible times only thanks to the devoted care provided them by Pańczyszyn, who tied his fate to that of the two Jewish women. Once, after Schweitzer resolved to leave the hiding place so as not to endanger the lives of her sister and her husband, Pańczyszyn insisted that she remain. He repeatedly underscored that in any case, they all shared the same fate, and motivated by altruism alone, would not allow her to leave. After the war, Schweitzer immigrated to Israel and Pańczyszyn and his wife and daughter moved to an area within the new Polish borders. On June 7, 1990, Yad Vashemrecognized Władysław Pańczyszyn as Righteous Among the Nations. File 4566