Regina and Stanisław Świda were honoured by Yad Vashen

, 16 November 2016
Last Thursday, on 22 March, the Yad Vashem Institute posthumously awarded Stanisław and Regina Świd from Warsaw with the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations. The medal and the certificate of honour were handed to their granddaughter, Małgorzata Gronek. The ceremony took place in the Yad Vashem seat in Jerusalem and was attended by Dr Avraham Horowitz (the person saved by the Świd family), the family and friends of Świds and by Urszula Jurczyńska, the Consul of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Israel.

The story of how the Świd family managed to rescue Avraham Horowitz is truly extraordinary. The boy was hiding under fake identity of a Tatar.

In April of 1943, Tatiana and Benjamin Horowitz, along with their 3-year-old son Avraham, escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto. When they reached the “Aryan” side of the town, the family split and Avraham found himself in the house of Stanisław and Regina Świd. Seeing that the boy was circumcised, it seemed almost impossible to hide the fact that he was Jewish.

Then, Stanisław Świda came up with the idea of changing the official identity of Avraham and creating a story of him being a child of the family's non-existent friends – Muslim Tatars. This version would explain why the child was circumcised. Stanisław came forward to the representatives of the Tatar community in Warsaw and told the fake story of a Tatar orphan who had been dropped at his door. His story was so believable that Avraham was officially accepted as a Tatar boy. His name was changed to Achmet and his surname to Kraczkiewicz. Under his new identity, he lived with the Świd family until the end of the war. In 1950, he moved to Israel with his mother.

source: www.yadvashem.org