Leszczyński Włodzimierz & Leszczyńska Stefania

Leszczyński Włodzimierz Leszczyńska Stefania In early 1943, the lives of the few Jews who lived in the town of Zborow in the Tarnopol district were in danger. Hersh Fuhrman, a local Jew, turned to Stefania Leszczyńska, who before the war had worked for him as a domestic help, asking her and her husband, Włodzimierz, a tailor, to shelter him and his wife Dwora, as well as eight other Jews. The Leszczyńskis, guided by humanitarian motives that overrode considerations of personal safety or economic hardship, prepared the attic of their house for the Jewish refugees, and built an emergency exit that was well camouflaged. The ten refugees – including the Fuhrman couple, Berta Goldstein and her baby daughter Dziunia, Leib and Mina Alterman and their sons Wolf and Mordechai – crowded into the small, almost totally dark, space. The Leszczyńskis hid the two others refugees – Bunek Adler and Janka Rochberger, a refugee from Lwow – in another hideout. Under such conditions, the refugees some became a close-knit family, under the Leszczyńskis’ care. The Leszczyńskis, who lived in a hostile Ukrainian environment, guarded their secret carefully, and saw to all the refugees’ needs. In risking their lives in this way, the Leszczyńskis were guided by humanitarian considerations only. The ten refugees were liberated in July 1944, and after the war left Poland. Leszczyński and his wife left home after the war, and moved to Lower Silesia, within post-war Poland’s new territories. Most of the survivors immigrated to Israel and, in 1988, invited Włodzimierz Leszczyński, who had meanwhile become widowed, to stay with them. On May 8, 1988, Yad Vashem recognized Stefania and Włodzimierz Leszczyński as Righteous Among the Nations.