Raszeja Franciszek

Raszeja, Franciszek On July 21, 1942, on the eve of the great deportation of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, the well-known surgeon Professor Franciszek Raszeja was asked to visit the home of his friend Albert Szulberg who lived on Chłodna Street in the ghetto in order to examine his sister, who was very ill. In those days, a visit by a Polish doctor to a Jewish patient in the ghetto was unusual, and therefore a special entry permit was arranged for him through a Polish woman who had the right connections with the German authorities. While Professor Raszeja was sitting at the patient's bedside, the Gestapo burst into the house and murdered all the men there, including Professor Raszeja. Professor Raszeja had long been devoted to questions of human rights. In the 1930s, he had opposed the antisemitic trends prevailing in Poland which discriminated against the Jewish students in the universities. In the Nazi occupation period he engaged in underground activity and was in constant contact with his assistant Dr. Kazimierz Pollak who had joined his Jewish wife in the ghetto. The day after Professor Raszeja funeral, held in the presence of an enormous crowd in Warsaw, the German authorities informed his newly widowed wife that she must immediately vacate her apartment since the neighborhood in which she lived was also about to become a German residential area. On April 11, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Franciszek Raszeja as Righteous Among the Nations. File: 8888