Kołtan Aleksander ; Son: Romuald ; Daughter: Karkowska Jadwiga (Kołtan)

Kołtan, Aleksander Kołtan, Romuald Karkowska-Kołtan, Jadwiga-Aniela Szmuel Epelbaum was seven in the summer of 1942 when his father brought him, from their village of Konstantynow in the Biala Podlaska district, to his acquaintance Aleksander Kołtan, a widowed and disabled farmer, who lived with his son Romuald and his daughter Jadwiga in the nearby village of Komarno. The Jewish child was warmly received in the Kołtan home, but several weeks later his father decided to take him home again. A month later, Szmuel returned to the Kołtan family, exhausted, hungry and frightened. He told them that his parents along with all the Jews of his town had been murdered, and after escaping the massacre, he had decided to return to their home, the only possibility he saw of saving himself. Romuald and Jadwiga, who ran the family farm, decided to shelter the orphaned refugee and prepared a hiding place for him in the hayloft, camouflaging it well and leaving him a way to get out in an emergency. In the spring of 1943, because of Romuald and Jadwiga’s underground activities and the danger they entailed, Szmuel was moved to the home of a forester, which was safer, even though other tenants of the building he lived in were active in the underground. In a Gestapo raid on the house, all the tenants were shot to death, and only Szmuel who had gone out to the pasture with the cows, was saved. Once again the Jewish child returned to the Kołtans, who hid him in his former hiding place, where he remained until his liberation by the Red Army in July 1944. The Kołtan family felt that by saving a persecuted Jew, they were being patriotic, acting against a common enemy. After the war, Szmuel Epelbaum immigrated to the United States, where he was killed in a road accident. On March 29, 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Aleksander Kołtan, his son Romuald Kołtan and his daughter Jadwiga Karkowska neé Kołtan as Righteous Among the Nations.