Śliwiak Andrzej

Śliwiak, Andrzej Before the war, Andrzej Śliwiak lived in Kolomyja , in Eastern Galicia, where he worked as a guard in the marketplace. Since his house was situated not far from the ghetto, Śliwiak witnessed the evacuation of the Jews from the ghetto. One day in the autumn of 1942, as he approached the ghetto perimeter, Zygmunt Prinz called out to him from over the fence, and asked him to find a hiding place for him and some friends in one of the surrounding villages. After abortive attempts to find them a hiding place, Śliwiak decided to offer them shelter himself. Accordingly, one night in November 1942, six Jews – Zygmunt Prinz, Abraham Sperber, Pola and Marceli Najder, Fryderyk Ferber and his son Aleksander – escaped from the ghetto and made their way to Śliwiak’s home. At first Śliwiak hid them in his attic, but as the cold weather set in, he built them a bunker inside a cellar in his yard, which he furnished with sofas and other pieces of furniture. Later, the refugees were joined by four other Jews – Arnold Bernard, Mundek Rath, Józef Weitz, and a boy called Menek Goldstein – who had to leave their former hiding places. Although it was no easy matter looking after ten people in a small, crowded bunker, Śliwiak, was not deterred, but regarded the assignment as a challenge. Guided by humanitarian motives, which overrode considerations of personal safety or economic hardship, Śliwiak looked after all ten refugees single-handedly, until the liberation in March 1944, without expecting anything in return. After the war, most of the survivors left Poland, some for Israel, and other for the United States and Australia, while Śliwiak himself settled within Poland’s postwar borders On September 17, 1984, Yad Vashem recognized Andrzej Śliwiak as Righteous Among the Nations.