Pastuszka Tadeusz & Marianna

Pastuszka, Tadeusz Pastuszka, Marianna During the war, Tadeusz and Marianna Pastuszka and their two children lived in the village of Chmielow, near the city of Opatow, in the Kielce district. They farmed a small plot that was not enough to support the family, and to supplement their income Tadeusz Pastuszka would go into the city to find work. In 1943, Pastuszka was working in a factory that built train cars in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, not far from his home, where he came across Jewish forced laborers. In the autumn of 1943, Moshe Broker, one of the workers in the factory whom he knew from before the war, contacted Pastuszka and asked him to prepare a hiding place on his farm for a few members of his family and some additional prisoners in return for payment. Pastuszka consented, and they agreed that the fugitives would pay him 1,000 zlotys a month to build the shelter and to cover all the expenses involved in equipping and maintaining it. Pastuszka and his wife spent a few months digging out an underground shelter that was carefully hidden under one of the farm buildings. In late 1943, 16 Jewish prisoners that had fled from the camp arrived and found asylum in the shelter the Pastuszkas had built. They remained there until the liberation in January 1945. Among the Jews in hiding were members of the Rappaport, Koplowicz, Broker and Weinberg families, and Jews named Horn, Fuks and Crandell. For over a year, Tadeusz and Marianna Pastuszka devotedly cared for all the needs of the fugitives they had taken under their wing, placing their kitchen at their disposal, buying all their provisions and caring for their health. Despite the fact that the money they received from the fugitives was insufficient to cover the cost of building and maintaining the shelter, they supplemented the rest from their own money. All their efforts to save the Jews were motivated by altruism rather than by a desire for money. After the war, all the survivors left Poland, some immigratingto Israel and others to the United States. On December 6, 1984, Yad Vashem recognized Marianna Pastuszka and her husband Tadeusz Pastuszka as Righteous Among the Nations.