Maj Józefa ; Husband: Wilchelm

Maj, Józefa Maj, Wilchelm Ida Paluch was born in 1939 in Sosnowiec. When she and her twin brother Adam were four months old, Germany attacked Poland and their father, Chaim Leizer, was drafted to the Polish army. He disappeared in the east, and the family assumed that he was killed. This left his widow, Esther Paluch, alone with three children: the infant twins and their older sister, Genia (b. 1931). The persecution of the Jews began immediately after the German occupation of Sosnowiec. The Jews were concentrated in a ghetto, and their lives became more and more difficult. In August 1942, Esther, driven by terrible desolation and hopelessness, committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Her sister Róża took the orphaned children into her home. Before the war, Róża had owned a shop, and bought coal from a Pole by the name of Wilchelm Maj. Wishing to help his former client, Maj came to the ghetto fence and when he saw Ida, he proposed to take the child to his home in Czestochowa. Róża handed the little girl over to him through the barbed wire fence, and Maj brought her home. Although his wife, Józefa, was pregnant, she did not hesitate to warmly welcome Ida into her home. They renamed her Irena, and baptized her so as to eliminate any hint of her Jewish identity. In 1943 Wilchelm Maj, who belonged to the Polish underground, was caught and executed. Józefa moved with Ida-Irena and her own baby daughter Wilusia to her in-laws' home. Unable to deal with the loss of his son, Władysław Maj took to drinking excessively, and life at the house became unbearable. Consequently, the young widow was forced to leave, and wandered with the two children from one place to another. She spent the rest of the war homeless, barely making ends meet by selling cigarettes and alcohol. Despite their desperate situation, however, Józefa continued to care for her Ida-Irena with love and warmth. After the area was liberated in January 1945, Ida-Irena’s father, who hadmiraculously survived in the Soviet Union, returned and was able to trace his daughter. Learning about the fate of the Jews of Sosnowiec, he was convinced that his wife and his two other children had been killed and gave up searching for them. He remarried, but his new wife, also a survivor, did not get along with his daughter, and Ida was placed in a Jewish orphanage. When Chaim Leizer and his wife moved to Wrocław, he took Ida back, and the three immigrated to Israel in 1957. All through her childhood Ida suffered from her stepmother’s negative attitude towards her, and after she married she emigrated from Israel to the United States. Once settled in the US, Ida decided to search for her brother, Adam, armed only with a photo of the two of them as babies. One day, a friend of Ida’s sent her an article from an American newspaper. It was about Jewish children who were hidden in Catholic homes during the holocaust, and featured a picture of a man. Ida intuitively felt that this person, called Jerzy Dolebski, was her lost brother. She obtained his phone number and contacted him in Poland. When the two met at the Warsaw airport they immediately realized that they were indeed each other’s twin, reunited for the first time after 53 years. On March 22, 2011, Yad Vashem recognized Józefa and Wilchelm Maj as Righteous Among the Nations.