Kapłan Wanda (Pisula)

Pisula-Kaplan Wanda During the occupation, Wanda Pisula worked on a farm near Lublin, together with a number of Jewish prisoners of war from the camp on Lipowa Street in Lublin. While working together, Pisula became friendly with them and won their trust, and after the prisoners learned that they were about to be sent to the Majdanek concentration camp, they asked Pisula to hide them in her home. With her own hands, Pisula prepared a hiding place in the yard near her house, into which the eight Jewish men and two young women that joined them were crowded for a year and a half. Although the fugitives arrived with only the clothes on their back, Pisula cared for them with great devotion, bearing all the costs of feeding and caring for them. Suspecting that she was hiding Jews, her neighbors informed on her to the authorities, and the police conducted a search of her apartment but, fortunately, did not find anyone. Despite the many dangers and hardships she experienced, nothing deterred Pisula from the task she had taken upon herself, and the ten Jews she hid in her yard all survived until the liberation. Pisula was a poor woman whose basic love of her fellow humans caused her to identify with the fate of the Jews and risk her life to save them. After the war, she married Jona Kaplan, one of the Jews whose life she saved. They immigrated to Israel and Pisula tied her fate to that of the Jewish people. On July 24, 1975, Yad Vashem recognized Wanda Kaplan (née Pisula) as Righteous Among the Nations.