Uggla Hjalmar & Ludwika (Wylezińska)

Uggla, Hjalmar Uggla, Ludwika Kazimierz (Kazik) Lewartowicz (later, Cass Lewart) was born in Łódź, Poland, in 1930 to Zygmunt, a lawyer, and Zofia, a concert pianist. The family was not religious. After the German occupation of Poland in 1939, the family managed to stay in Warsaw under false identities, "always one step ahead of the Gestapo and Polish blackmailers," recalled Kazimierz. However, in 1942 they were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to prison. Zygmunt, who spoke fluent German, managed to confuse the Gestapo and convinced them to let Zofia and Kazimierz leave a few days later. Once the mistake was discovered, Zygmunt was thrown into the Warsaw ghetto (he was saved from being shot by the fact that a few months’ amnesty had been declared). Through bribes, Zofia managed to get her husband out, but he died of a stomach hemorrhage the next day. In August 1944, when the uprising broke out, Zofia was wounded, and became separated from her son, who joined the Polish underground. In early October, Kazimierz escaped from a transport headed to the Pruszków transit camp, and discovered his mother in Miłanówek, a small town near Warsaw. Zofia later wrote in her memoir: "Then we found a family – engineer [Hjalmar] Uggla – with his second young wife [Ludwika] and many children. He hid two Jewish girls, sisters, and us in the crawl space under the living room floor.” At different times, that space became a shelter to dozens of Jews. The Uggla children were small – the oldest was born in 1935 – and Hjalmar and Ludwika certainly put all of their lives at risk by their actions. During 1944, Germans would perform raids in Miłanówek every few days, searching for Warsaw refugees. When Jews were discovered, their Polish rescuers were sent to forced labor camps, and the Jews were killed. Once, such a raid took place in the Uggla household, and as the lid of the shelter closed it made a loud noise. Luckily, there was a goat in the house that started buckingwidely, which made the German patrol believe that it was the cause of the noise. The Lewartowiczes stayed with the Ugglas for some three months, until their liberation in January 1945. After the war, Zofia and Kazimierz immigrated to the US, and slowly lost contact with their rescuers. However, when Hjalmar became threatened by the Polish secret police, Zofia wrote a heartfelt letter about his heroic wartime deeds, and he was left alone. The two families got in touch again when Dr Zbigniew Uggla, Hjalmar and Ludwika’s son, was preparing to give a talk about his parents’ wartime experiences and discovered Cass Lewart’s memoirs on the Internet. On May 6, 2007, Yad Vashem recognized Hjalmar and Ludwika Uggla as Righteous Among the Nations.