Zioło Władysław & Petronela

Zioło, Władysław Zioło, Petronela Joe Gottdenker was born in Sandomierz in 1942. At the time of Joe's birth, his father Ben was already in a forced labor camp, while his mother Bina (née Zuckerbrot) had managed to obtain false "Aryan" identification papers and was living on a small farm with her Polish Christian friends, Władysław and Petronela Zioło. The Ziołos had two young children, who knew to keep secret the true identity of the mother and child staying with them. Władysław and Petronela themselves were dedicated to the preservation of their friend and her baby. However, one day, Bina noticed that a girl she used to know at university had arrived to the area. Fearing denouncement, she left her son with the Ziołos and left to join the partisans. Joe was brought up by the Ziołos as their own family member, with loving care and in the Christian faith. Following liberation, Bina returned and reunited with her young son. She remained in close contact with the Ziołos in an effort to mollify the difficult transition for the infant from whom the woman he regarded as his real mother into her own care. Meanwhile, Joe’s uncle, David Zuckerbrot, had survived concentration camps in Germany and was liberated by the US Army. He went to work caring for refugees and survivors in Germany. The connections that came with his job enabled him to locate his sister Bina and little Joe in Poland and take them back to Germany with him. There, they found Ben Gottdenker, who, too, had survived. Several years later, the family moved to the US, and then finally to Canada, where Joe was brought up within the Jewish community. Despite the difficult and complex transitions that Joe had been through, from a Catholic peasant boy to a Canadian Jewish youth, his parents barely spoke to him of what had happened during the war. Most of his knowledge on the subject was gleaned from his uncle David. However, the senior Gottdenkers did correspond with the Ziołos for the rest oftheir lives. In 1977, Tadeusz Zioło, the rescuers’ son, moved with his family to the US, and visited the Gottdenkers. A few years later, Joe Gottdenker, who by that time had his own family, renewed contact with his rescuers through their only living descendant – their granddaughter Beata Świerć. On September 19, 2010, Yad Vashem recognized Władysław and Petronela Zioło as Righteous Among the Nations.