Ciurko Julia

Bigos, Anton and Anastazja Skrzeczynski-Ciurko, Julia At the outbreak of the war, Sabina Fuchs (b. 1931) lived with her parents in Zborów, Poland. The region, which was then called Galicja, was soon occupied by the Russians. The Fuchses’ large house was taken over by the Soviet administration, which assigned another three families to live there. When in 1941 the Germans invaded and the Russians fled, other tenants came into the house, and when a ghetto was established, the house became part of it, filled with Jewish inhabitants. Sabina’s father, Yaakov, was head of the Judenrat (Jewish council) in Zborów. Her mother, Klara-Chaja, worked at a sewing workshop. Sabina, then 10 years old, joined her and sometimes took cleaning jobs. After she caught typhus and was cured, she was considered immune and could be used as a courier to pass food and clothing to the typhus patients in the hospital. The family’s position was somewhat better than that of others. They had managed to hide some of the stock from the bulk produce store they had owned before the war. They also had valuable items that they could sell for cash or trade for food with the same Polish suppliers with whom they had established contacts for the store. The Poles knew the ghetto area very well and always found ways to sneak inside, with the Ukrainian guards shutting their eyes to it in exchange for a slice of the profit. Klara-Chaja would let the Polish women choose whatever they wanted from her closet in exchange for potatoes, flour, beans, or some dairy products. When they saw that even with good work permits there was no chance to survive the upcoming Aktion (mass execution) in 1943, the parents decided to send Sabina away to the house of Anton Bigos and his girlfriend, Anastazja, who had already built a shelter for Rachel Bromer (Sabina’s aunt) and her daughter, Julia. Anton and Anastazja agreed to hide the girl as well. In the same year, another aunt, Bela Weigler, and her two children, Lea and Moshe, joined the refugees in Bigos’s shelter. Sabina’s father was killed in the summer of 1943, and her mother escaped the ghetto and came to join her daughter. The shelter had been built for three people, and there were now seven. Klara Fuchs found Julia Ciurko, an acquaintance from Zborów, who agreed to take Sabina and her cousin, and she treated them as family despite the danger to herself and her two young children. They stayed until the fall of 1944, when the Russian occupation returned to Galicja, turning it into part of Ukraine. On July 23, 2007, Yad Vashem recognized Anton and Anastazja Bigos and Skrzeczynski-Ciurko, Julia as Righteous Among the Nations.