Mossiczy First name unknown

Prof. Mossiczy and wife Mr. Trunkwalter When World War II broke out, Ephraim Salomon Margulies, his wife Speranza, and their daughter Johanna Miriam Renata lived in Stryj, Poland. On July 2, 1941 the Germans occupied the town. Ephraim Salomon Margulies was beaten by the Germans and died of his wounds five months later. Speranza and her daughter were incarcerated in the ghetto, which by 1942 held over 9,000 Jews. They survived the killing operations in September and October 1942 by hiding with eleven other people in a tiny hideout between the attic in the roof of a building. After the war, Speranza Margulies wrote an account of her wartime fate and described the cramped conditions in the small hiding place, and how her daughter wanted to kill herself and asked her mother for poison. Conditions were so bad that they decided that they were unable to return to the place in time of need, and therefore Speranza Margulies got her daughter a false identity as a Christian. In her testimony to Yad Vashem Johanna Margulies said that she converted to Christianity in 1942, but that she returned to Judaism after the war. After leaving the ghetto Johanna Margulies turned to a friend of her father. She stayed with this couple for ten days, but they feared that their Ukranian landlord would denounce them and therefore gave Johanna their daughter’s papers and accompanied her to the railway station. After they left her, Johanna Margulies was arrested, but the Polish policeman who interrogated her was a former student of her father’s friend, and he therefore let her go. Johanna travelled to Czortkow and went to Prof. Mossiczy, the father of a boy she had been in love with. The Mossiczys hid her for two months, but then they too became afraid, especially since the Germans carried out brutal killings of the Jews in the Czortkow ghetto. “I was desperate by this time”, Margulies told Yad Vashem, “and asked whether they knew of a priest who could help me”. With the help of the priest Margulies eventually came to a convent, where she stayed for the remainder of the war. After her daughter had left, another killing operation took place in Stryj, and Spernaza Margulies hid for a day in a cellar where conditions were even worse than in the attic. All her family and friends were taken away, and she decided to turn to an acquaintance of German descent who had been buying her valuables, but when she came to that woman’s home, the woman only laughed in her face. “I left her home thinking that I was going to be killed”, Speranza wrote in her account, “As I was in the hallway I met a piano tuner who had tuned our piano and who had been my husband’s client. He asked why I was so desperate, and I told him everything. He asked me to enter his apartment”. The piano tuner, Mr. Trunkwalter, had an apartment in the same building. He left Speranza in his home and went out. When he returned, he said that the Germans were conducting a killing operation in the ghetto and suggested that she should stay at his place. In time of danger, she would hide in a big cupboard. Trunkwalter helped another Jewish couple, and the neighbors became suspicious and denounced him. When the police came, they searched the place but did not find Speranza who was sitting in the cupboard with poison she intended to take in case she was found. At another time, a neighbor asked for money in return for keeping silent. Trunkwalter did not want to pay, and fortunately, before the neighbor decided to go to the police, a bombing started and everybody went down to the cellar. Shortly before liberation Germans conducted a search and found Speranza’s belongings, but the Red Army liberated Stryj and she was saved. On March 18, 1982 Yad Vashem recognized Prof. Mossiczy and his wife and Mr. Trunkwalter as Righteous Among the Nations.