Kurpiel Stanisław & Franciszka

Kurpiel, Stanisław and Franciszka Joseph Fabian (b. 1921) was in the Przemyśl Ghetto, first working as a cook, then as a caretaker for an SS officer at his house, where he was taken every day under guard. The SS officer lived across from a Polish man named Kurasz. Kurasz suggested that Fabian escape—he knew someone who could hide him. In September 1943 the ghetto was liquidated. Kurasz had arranged for Fabian to be taken by a messenger to Stanisław Kurpiel’s farm in Pralkowice in the Przemyśl area. The farm was isolated, hidden in a forest near the river San. When he arrived, he found an underground shelter already in place. The shelter was home to eight other Jews, and soon more people arrived. Kurpiel enlarged the bunker and put in enough bunk beds to shelter 24 people. Among the people hidden there, apart from Joseph Fabian, were three members of the Rubin family, two brothers by the name of Spiegel, Dr. Rebhun, Bolek Sternberg and his girlfriend, and the Jonas couple. Kurpiel was very friendly with the Jews he was hiding. He brought them news and tried to keep their spirits up, saying that the war would soon end and they would all march back into the city together “carrying a flag.” Kurpiel’s wife, Franciszka, was friendly as well. They had six children, which made the danger they took upon themselves by hiding Jews all the greater. In his testimony Joseph Fabian wrote: “We were sitting in the bunker all day, playing cards, reading books and dreaming about liberation. We could leave the bunker at night only.” In May 1944 the Gestapo came in the middle of the night and surrounded the house. It was unclear whether they had suspected the Kurpiels before, or if, as eyewitness Stefania Kucharska suggested, someone had seen Franciszka buying enormous amounts of produce in town to feed all the people in her house and had taken their suspicions to the Nazi authorities. There was an escape tunnel leading from the bunker into the forest, but only four people managed to get through it, and two of them were shot at once when they reached the surface. The two who succeeded in running away into the forest were Joseph Fabian (who was wounded) and Herman Spiegel, one of the two brothers. All the rest had been killed. The Kurpiels were taken to prison in Przemyśl and executed a month later. On April 28, 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Stanisław and Franciszka Kurpiel as Righteous Among the Nations.