Walczak Stanislaw

Walczak, Stanislaw File 5335 Stanislaw Walczak, a professor of law, lived in Kraków and was active in the (Communist) Polish Workers’ Party, the PPR. On behalf of his party, Walczak established a relationship with Shimon Draenger, head of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Kraków, and cooperated with him in issuing forged documents. In the autumn of 1942, an acquaintance contacted Walczak and asked him to help Jerzy Keiner, a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy who had fled from the ghetto after his mother had been sent to a death camp. Unable to accommodate the Jewish teenager in his apartment, Walczak equipped him with forged papers and delivered him to a Polish family in Warsaw. In the autumn of 1943, Walczak also moved to Warsaw, where, by posing as Keiner’s uncle, he stayed in touch with the boy regularly, enabling him to keep up his studies, and found him a job. Later on, Keiner moved to Otwock, near Warsaw, where he joined the Polish underground and the socialist organization WRN. After the liberation in September 1944, Keiner volunteered for the Polish army and eventually became a well-known author in Poland under the name of Jerzy Korczak. In his subsequent testimony, Professor Walczak wrote, “I considered it a moral imperative to assist Jews who were doomed to death. Some of what I did traces to my personal experience. . . . When I was a high-school student in Kraków, I was assisted by a Jewish family that helped me with housing and basic needs asking nothing in return.” Keiner-Korczak, who appreciated Walczak’s assistance during his ordeal, wrote in his post-war testimony, “For me he was not only a caregiver but also a friend, a matter of supreme importance under the circumstances of our lives.” On June 16, 1992, Yad Vashem recognized Professor Stanislaw Walczak as Righteous Among the Nations.