Couples posthumously honoured for helping WWII Jews
PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle
07.10.2014 12:56
Three Polish couples have been posthumously awarded medals of the Righteous among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem for helping save Jews during the Second World War.
photo - Mira Fiutak /facebook
Zofia and Alfred Hubner, residents of Lviv, then in Poland, gave shelter in December 1942 to a four year-old Jewish girl, who had been taken out from the city’s ghetto.
After the war, the girl went to Israel and lost contact with the Hubner family.
It was only last year that she and Ewa, the daughter of Zofia and Alfred Hubner, traced their whereabouts and met.
“We are a family again,” Ewa said at a ceremony in Gliwice, Upper Silesia, during which her mother received the medal from the hands of a representative of the Jewish Embassy in Warsaw.
The Hubner family settled in Gliwice after the war.
The other medals were collected by the children of the recipients. Eighty year-old Jozef Zięcik collected the medal on behalf of his parents, Julia and Kazimierz Zięcik, who in 1943-44 sheltered in their house and farm buildings a group of 13 runaways from the Jewish ghetto in Tarnopol in Poland’s eastern borderlands, now in Ukraine.
About 25 000 people from 47 countries have been honoured with the Righteous among the Nations medals, close on 6 500 of them being Poles. (mk/pg)